Song 430: Seven weeks after my previous post about a personal friend, this week the playlist puts the spotlight on Hats by Jeff Wilkinson, who also wrote the song, with this being his first appearance on the playlist, and you can find a YouTube video of his track by clicking on the title. Back around the turn of the 1990s, he and I together created what we called The Camptown Coffeehouse in Brooklyn where we presented shows at a church on 7th Ave. of our favorite fellow singer-songwriters. While we have not been in touch for a couple of decades, I always respected his talent, and I think this cut from his 2005 CD Landscapes showcases all of them pretty well. During the era when we ran the coffeehouse, one night at the weekly Jack Hardy songwriter gathering in lower Manhattan, someone put forth a challenge for the following week to write a song about hats. I responded, but I didn't consider my hat tune anything special, and I soon rewrote the lyrics, turning it into a tale about AIDS called Fire in the Blood. I don't recall whether Jeff attended those two songwriter gatherings, but if he did, and this piece was the result, then I'd have to say that he rose to the challenge better than anyone else. Like him, I know how it feels to figuratively have too many hats, but at this point in my life, the phrase has come to have a literal meaning as well, and I wonder if that also might have happened to him. Maybe one of these days we'll reconnect, and I will get to ask him.
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