Good week so far for riding - caught The Morning Ride up at Patapsco on Weds, and I'm fix'n to catch it tomorrow AM, on the snow. Might not even need lights, the way the moon & stars light up the woods on the white snow. Can't begin to tell you how awesome that is... it's like a tall drink of cool water for a tired soul.

Hit the gym once too. Didn't do a lot, ol' boy knows that lifting heavy to start out with causes a wicked case of tendinitis. Did a bunch of mixed dumbell work, only thing remotely heavy was some flat bar bench with a couple 45 plates that was surprisingly easy. Gotta start slow, to go faster later. Surprisingly, it felt good to lift. I have hardly touched the weights for 5 years, and I've kind of missed it after 20 years of it being a constant companion to keep rugby fit. Oh no, I don't want to pack on the muscle. Shoot, I can put on 20 pounds of solid muscle in 6 weeks if I try. But I'd like to improve my mountain biking and getting back some wiry strength and converting just a little fat to muscle would help the riding and the weight loss.

Anyhow... some tunes.

Let's start with a little R.L. Burnside. Damned if a lot of the stuff I like now doesn't trace its roots back to North Mississipi garage / hill blues. I've only noticed that recently, I'm still exploring myself. *Now* I get why guys like Clapton and everybody else were making pilgrimages to go jam with Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. This is a distilled, high test form of the blues, re-mixed with its great-grandchildren, funk, rock, soul and techno.



Here's a little more, that's got a bit more traditional blues mixed in. And a bit more raw garage sound. And some NSFW. This is maybe the best Friday Quittin' Time song I've ever heard.



"I know goddam well it's party time." Yeah, that's how I'm feeling, and it's not even Friday yet. When I'm writing this anyhow. "I got a back pocket of whiskey, and a front pocket of gin. You gonna open up this door, or I'm gonna kick the mothafucka in." Okay, so it's pretty profane, not everybody's cup of tea. But I know where he's coming from. Keep in mind, the guy playing this killed a man in a gambling fight, and he's maybe about 75 when he's singing this and playing the guitar. A lot of folks get old. Some others just get better.

R.L. did some classic blues. One of his better traditional Delta Blues songs is Stack-O-Lee.



That isn't the "original" Stack-O-Lee. Nobody really knows what the original is, to tell the truth. Mississippi John Hurt sang a great version of it in a very early, primal, Delta country blues style.



Beautiful piece of music. Both this and Burnside's song were based on a story about a St. Louis pimp, "Stagger" Lee Shelton, getting drunk and shooting one of his friends for the grievous sin of taking his hat. According to contemporaneous news accounts, Stagger Lee shot his friend Billy Lyons in the stomach, then coolly retrieved his hat and departed the saloon. For some reason, the story just resonated with performers. Taj Mahal did a modern version of it, and even Jerry Reed (yeah, that Jerry Reed) did a gloss of it.

And apropos of nothing... a little Reverend to close it out for the week.



And this will end it on a high note for sure.



But things ain't so bad, 'cuz I got a Galaxy 500.