A full day spent on one project!

When we come to Katie & Savanna's, we have the advantage of WiFi. So I usually bring wiith me a project of some kind that needs WiFi. This time it was the liner notes for the CD I'm making of The Merry Lyin' - the vocal trio Tony Barrand was in when he was a 22-year-old exchange student at Swarthmore College in 1967. I have a very full post on this on February 3, 2022 titled "Working on another CD." I decided that I wanted the liner notes to have basic information on each song plus the lyrics! That, of course, requires going online and doing a search for each song. Amazingly, I found lyrics for every song, despite the fact that some were not well-known, and it was 55 years ago! But it wasn't just finding lyrics, it was finding the right lyrics. Often there are several versions of a folksong, and Merry Lyin' often did a more "out-of-the-way" version. However, I found that they always did a version that was recorded by someone. A good example is the song So early, early in the Spring," which goes back to 1690 and has been recorded by a lot of people, including Judy Collins. Merry Lyin's lyrics were different from everyone I could find. I must have looked at a dozen. But I finally found a recording made by Cyril Tawney in 1965 that had been archived on YouTube. It was buried in a file of 30 or more songs by Tawney. It had exactly the lyrics Merry Lyin' used. I don't know if they had heard his recording, or they had found the source he used. However, Merry Lyin' also often made minor changes in whatever lyrics they used. So in every case, I have had to find the lyrics, paste them into a file, and then play their recording and compare their words with what is in the file, making revisions as needed. Doing all that for 16 songs took all day. Plus I had to do formatting. But I think I now have basically a usable little booklet that will accompany the CD. I can't really print it out here at K&S's - I'll have to wait until I get back to my printer. But that is a good accomplishment. Thanks to Laura Hassler, one of the members of Merry Lyin' who is now living in the Netherlands, I have some pictures of the three members of Merry Lyin', not from 1967, but from their reunion concert which - wonder of wonders - took place in the Guilford Community Church in the summer of 2006! And Ellen and I were there! I had forgotten that until I saw the photos and began to remember things. How could I have forgotten that!

Laura Hassler, Tony Barrand and Mike Greenwald, at a 2006 reunion of Merry Lyin' at the Guilford Church. I've tried to find out the whereabouts of Mike Greenwald, but he has disappeared. Laura Hassler doesn't know where he is either. *********************** Tonight, we had a nice supper - the Mac & Cheese plus squash and broccoli that Ellen brought - and I did the dishes and now we are watching the Olympics. First the pairs skating and now the half-pipe skiing free-style. Amazing what they can do!

Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier, American pairs skaters - they were fantastic!

Gus Kenworthy, a dual citizen of the U.S. and U.K., competing for the U.K. in the half-pipe to honor his mother.