Take a listen to a newly re-mixed version of the Prologue to “Saint Stephen’s Dream: A Space Opera.” This is also an mp3 file, not an AAC file like the one in the post below (which will be consigned to the dustbin of podcast history after iTunes gets around to adding this mp3 version.)  Feel free to download this. And get yourself over to the iTunes and subcribe for free to receive notice of future podcasts, Web casts and live performances by the WebTheater of WestVirginiaVille (WTW), the producer of “Saint Stephen’s Dream: A Space Opera.” The ending of this new version also includes a brief ad for the WTW, introducing your program host, Peggy Desiree Nash.

Here’s the YouTube version of a stroll through some religious iconography in Milan, Venice, Verona and Rome in Summer 2008, titled “A Time Ago: Church and Empire from Milan to Rome”. (I just wanted to use the word ‘iconography’ once this month.) I much prefer the full-screen SoundSlides version of this audio slideshow, with its Ken Burns effects, which YouTube strips out. (Click on the tiny four-arrows icon to watch both the YouTube and SoundSlides full-screen.) But you gotta yelp on YouTube to find a few more viewers, either in Banska Bystrica or Princeton, West Virginia. (Shout out to the ladies down on Mercer Street...)

And before you leave this mortal coil, be sure to visit 1)  Il Duomo in Milan, seen in the first few photos inside a cathedral said to be big enough to house 30,00 people, then pop up onto the roof amid its party of statues). 2) Go inside the Church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola at Campus Martius in Rome (or, as your map will say, the Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola). Look up. My goodness. That’s the last ceiling in the show. A showstopper. The instrumental music is  a piece called “Gladiator Song” by the Silent Gondoliers, featuring guitar, cheesy organ and bodhran.

Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola, Rome, 2008 | MoltoMediaWorks | click bigger

LISTEN: An a cappella version of “Wagoner’s Lad” |

I’ve fallen into a Wednesday night gathering in Huntington, W.Va., of ne’er-do-well singers and players with the entertaining band The 1937 Flood. They live up to their billing as “West Virginia’s most eclectic string band.” After each session, they post a song from that night’s playing, and last week Charlie, the master of musical ceremonies, requested my a cappella version of “Wagoner’s Lad.” I first learned this version from an old Trapezoid album, “Another Country,” a version sung by the late, lamented Freyda Epstein.

After discovering the song on Charlie’s Facebook fan page, I went and checked the lyrics to see if I’d mis-remembered any of them. Turns out, as is often the case with these old story ballads, that there are several versions, especially in one of the key lyrics. The way I learned it, the woman says “her parents don’t like HIM because he is poor….” Other versions have it that “His parents don’t like ME because I am poor…” I am inclined to go with the second one and re-learn that lyric as it would add more pathos to her tale. (Although asking my brain to re-learn a song deeply itched into its neural pathways after two decades, might be asking too much of the poor, tired thing.) The provenance of old songs is always fascinating and I appreciated Charlie fleshing out the story behind this sad Celtic tale of a woman in love, bound by the restrictions of her birth and time. Charlie writes:

This song is related to a lot of American folk songs, from “My Horse’s Ain’t Hungry” and “Rye Whiskey” to even “Pretty Polly” and “On Top of Old Smokey.” The verses, found in many songs, can be traced back to England in the 1730s and a song called “The Ladies Case.”

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One day in Rome in late June 2008, after properly appreciating the many pleasurable sights around the Roman Coliseum, we rounded the corner of the Via dei Fori Imperiali and headed into the warren of side streets that lead to the Villa Cellimontani and its outdoor Alexanderplatz Jazz Club series. This slideshow pays homage to both, part of a trip across Italy with my then 18-year-old son, Lucas, and his cousin, Neil Ross. The instrumental soundtrack is by the Silent Gondoliers. See more Italia slideshows here. P.S. The flute-ish sound you hear is my sister-in-law Marylin’s grade-school flutaphone, which I long ago exappropriated from her Capon Springs childhood bedroom. 

NOTE: You can view a larger-screen, higher-definition (and personally preferred) version of this SoundSlides by clicking here. But YouTube is where the masses hang, so you have to hang your video hat there, too.

I finally uploaded this ‘song-slide’ of  “I Won’t Be Famous” to YouTube.  As a high school graduation present, I took my son and his cousin to see Santana in Italy in June 2008 in the amazing Roman coliseum that stands in Verona, Italy. It was part of a two-week jaunt across the northern half of the land where my father was born. As the boys discovered the charms of post-midnight clubbing in Rome, I came back to our 5th floor apartment near the Termini train station and penned a draft of this song. I recorded it on my Mac once home and matched it to some portraits of our peregrinations around Italia. PS ~ This song has since been retitled “The Mountains of Instead” and will be featured in an upcoming episode of “Saint Stephen’s Dream | A Space Opera.” | Ciao.

NOTE | You can see a higher-resolution version of this SoundSlides here.

Come on down Dec. 11, 12 and 13, to “Christmas with the Riff-Raff,” featuring The RiffRaff Players at The Room Upstairs on the  funky end of Mercer Street in Princeton, W.Va. Thanks to  the excellent microphone on my iPhone (with a dash of Garageband reverb), listen-in on this rehearsal take of a gorgeous modal hymn that will be part of the upcoming holiday concerts, featuring familiar and not-so-familiar holiday tunes plucked from several centuries:

“Christmas with the Riff-Raff”| Five-Part Harmony

Show are at 7:30 p.m. Fri., Dec. 11 and  Sat., Dec. 12; with a 3 p.m. matinee on Sun. Dec. 13, 2009. Admission is $10 at the door. Sweets and treats will be served. The Room Upstairs, one of the coolest listening room spaces in the Mountain State, is at 865 Mercer Street, Princeton, W.Va., about one hour and 45 minutes south of Charleston, W.Va. You could Google Map it.

The RiffRaff Players feature vocals by Lori McKinney, Kathleen Coffee, Albert Perrone, Douglas Imbrogno and Melissa and Kayla McKinney, with eclectic acoustic and electronic instrumentation by The Captain  Lazerblast Band and soundsmithing by Robert Blankenship. The group’s most recent (and debut) performance was a production of the off-Broadway play “Songs for a New World,” staged at the Room Upstairs and as part of the Tamarack Dinner Theater Series.