The best review of my life just happened to come in today….

Sing Out on Picnic in the Sky!

When you send your CD out for review, it's a very odd act of hope and fear. When you get back two of the best reviews of your life in the same day, you wonder if something is in the air. I'll post one today and one tomorrow. Thanks very much to Sing Out for this review!

I hope you will read it and leave a comment on their site and/or here!

This is the review I have been dreaming of ever since I decided to hang up straight poetry and start putting my poems in song form about 12 years ago. I was sitting in the Old-time tent at Merlefest listening to Polecat Creek sing a bone-chiling a cappella ballad about a widowed man overwhelmed by his children. They were singing, what to me, was a poem. Later that same year, I heard Anne Hills sing a haunting song with a Tibetan singing bell, and I felt she was calling to me to lift my voice and sing simply about “them that made me.”

The place I come from in the coalfields of Appalachia is one of the the most beautiful and misunderstood places in the world. And it is my aim in life to continue to tell the stories of my home as best as I can. If I am called to turn my pen to other places like West Baltimore, then I will follow that call and bring my best words to it. I am ready to tell every story that comes to me and I can only hope that someone like Mr Weir will take notice. Absolutely, because it feels great and encourages me. I cried when I read this review. But I also hope this review will mean that the stories of these places and these people who called to me, will reach others who may need to hear these particular stories.

I have been sustained, galvanized, soothed, and troubled by storytellers, including mentors like Hazel Dickens and Sarah Ogan Gunning, in my life and I hope very much to “do them proud” as Mawmaw would say. This review encourages me to keep at it.
Thank you very much, Mr Weir, from me, Billy, and the Big Picnic Band!