Albert Ross (and the Otters)

Many of you know that I travel occasionally to Georgia’s neighbor to the west, the great state of Alabama, to (a) visit my daughter’s family and (b) continue my search for banjos of mass destruction. It turns out that I have been looking in the wrong place. I should have been looking in Leeds, Yorkshire.

Here is some lovely folk music by Albert Ross and the Otters (5:39) that includes the long-sought-for but elusive banjo.

Albert’s Myspace page reveals the following:

“Albert Ross was raised in the dwindling limelight of the Working Mens’ Clubs of the North of England. One third of a trio comprising of his father and his drunken uncle, he earned his fish and chips and a tenner a show knocking out the standard club fare of classic sixties and seventies sing a longs. In-between sets, whilst the punters would feast on bingo and pork scratchings, the teenage Albert could be found in the dressing room, with the eyes of bygone clubland heroes staring down at him from their faded publicity shots plastered around the walls. Cradling his guitar and swigging from a bottle of Newcastle Brown he sat and began to breathe life into the songs that filled his head.

“What followed was a blur of excitement. A decade of rock and roll shows and drunken shenanigans. Festivals and third world holidays. Dead end day jobs and never ending nights of wild abandon. Short-term, long distance love affairs. Streets packed tight with people bursting full of life. Shooting stars. Whirling dervishes. Blinding lights. Bands came and bands went. Bands re-formed and shifted shape. Players lived and died and told tales of dreams that came true and dreams that didn’t. It was a time of only good intention. A time to gather.

“Albert knew full well that if he’d learned anything from those wilderness years then that was how to write songs that reached out and hit people on a personal level. Songs that left the listener convinced they’d been written just for them. Songs that ached. Songs of love and loneliness. Songs that begged to be written. He knew too that to breathe life into such songs would require something out of the ordinary. A band of players both graceful and mighty. And so the Otters were born. Where, when and how remains a mystery but what was immediately clear from the very first gathering of tribe was that forces beyond our understanding were at work. Something new was in the air.

“They found a home and searched their souls for bigger and better ways to evolve. They took to the road and found many friends, but most importantly of all they put the songs at the heart of their quest. Now, as the days go by Albert Ross and the Otters continue to gather pace and are indeed in full swing. Wooing audiences across the country and winning fans the world wide.”

For more information, Albert Ross can be contacted at albertrossandtheotters@yahoo.co.uk

Any similarity between this post and a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is purely coincidental.

I’m no longer Alabamy bound

[Update: Because of a rare malady called bloggerus idioticus, yours truly neglected to include the link to the video clip at the place in this post where it should be possible to link to a video clip. This oversight has now been corrected, yours truly has been severely reprimanded, and the link is working properly. --RWP, May 26th, 1600 hours EDT]

We drove over to Alabamistan on Sunday afternoon. As usual, we first threw a couple of loads of laundry into the washing machine (one at a time, of course) and then into the dryer (ditto), turned up the thermostat on the air conditioner (because north Georgia has already had temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit), bought two new toothbrushes, packed our suitcases, dropped off Jethro at his favorite doggie dude ranch, and we were on our way.

I wanted to include at this point in this post a video clip of someone singing “I’m Alabamy Bound” and accompanying him- or herself on the banjo, but the clips I found that included banjos had no singing and the clips I found that included singing had no banjos. The nearest thing I found was a man who accompanied his singing (I use the term loosely) on something called an Autoharp, but it is my goal to keep you wonderful folks out there in Blogland coming back to my blog, not running from the room with your hands over your ears.

Having just missed last week’s 31st annual Do Dah Day parade in Birmingham, Mrs. RWP and I have consoled ourselves on this trip by attending (a) the birthday party of one grandson and (b) the presentation of honors by their school to two grandsons.

Today we have returned to our beloved Cherokee County, Georgia, where accompanying oneself on an Autoharp while singing “I’m Alabamy Bound” is considered a crime against humanity.

What the heck, I’m going to go ahead and throw in the video clip anyway just to get your reactions. It may help, while watching and listening to it, to try to picture the original manuscript of the poem “Kubla Khan” ten seconds after poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had penned the words “A damsel with a dulcimer...”

On second thought, no, it won’t.