Friday, February 27, 2009

Andy Roberts and his dead skunk

Andy Roberts and his partner, Linda Hartley are two people with whom I am connected in several spaces. Distributed across some of these spaces, we had a conversation about a song. It was a song I knew when I was on the peripheries of a Bluegrass band years ago. I had never encountered anyone else who knew it, but I mentioned it to Andy and he not only knew the song, he could tell me a bit about its history. Perhaps I served to nudge him, because here he is, singing it at a folk club, accompanying himself on his Chinese lute (to be honest, it needs a banjo, but the lute makes a viable substitute).



The reason I post this here is because of the example of a distributed conversation. Somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, Andy, Linda and I have had a conversation which has had this outcome.

Cool, huh?

2 comments:

John Zurovchak said...

Karyn,

I am not kidding you when I tell you that my six siblings and I used to sing this song on family trips. My Dad would always launch into this song whenever we passed by a dead skunk (and in my part of rural Pennsylvania in the United States - there were a LOT of dead skunks!) and we would jump in and sing too. When I was young I thought he made up the song, but then I heard it many years later. So from a small rural town in the state of Pennsylvania in the US - Here's to the dead skunk in the middle of the road - Stinking to high heaven! Thanks for taking me back to a very fond childhood memory...

Zed

The upsycho said...

@John Well, I learnt the song in a city called Durban, on the east coast of South Africa - so how's that for worlds apart, but joined by a silly song?

When you say that you thought your Dad had written the song, I can completely relate. I had a great uncle who, when I was little, I believed to have written all the Rudyard Kipling stories because he quoted them that often!