Miscellany: an introduction

 
Miscellany
Black Swan Blues

Texas Easter Fires

Murder Ballads
Stagger Lee

Frankie & Johnny

Knoxville Girl

Hattie Carroll

Secret London
The Giants' Wedding

Treasure Hunt Riots

Necropolis Railway

Lobby Lud

You won't find anything in this section that could comfortably fit into Murder Ballads or Secret London, but aside from that all bets are off.
What you will find includes:

Show Me the Bunny: Easter Fires in Texas. This piece describes my visit to a bizarre Texan festival which aims - in the words of it's own literature - to "blend the local fable of the Easter Bunny with the deeply religious facets of Easter". I wrote it back in 2001 as a sample chapter for a travel book that ended up never being published. Fortean Times bought a much, much shorter version of the same story later that year, but this is the first time it's appeared anywhere in its full form.

We had no room to include Pace in that project, so I'm using the material about him here instead

Black Swan Blues: America's first Motown. Harry Pace did everything Motown's Berry Gordy did, but did it 40 years earlier in an even more racist environment. His Black Swan Records was America's first major black-owned label, and the first to record ground-breaking blues artists like Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters and Fletcher Henderson. I stumbled across Pace's story while researching a blues programme for BBC Radio 4, but we had no room to include him in that particular project so I'm using the material here instead.

Coming in Feb ‘10: Kit Williams' Masquerade

I’ve researched and written on Kit Williams’ 1979 puzzle book twice now, once for a 2005 article in The Idler and once for a BBC Radio 4 documentary broadcast in July this year.
    Through a series of lucky chances, that Radio 4 documentary ultimately led to Williams and his golden hare being reunited for the first time in 30 years – an event recorded in this December’s BBC Four television documentary.
    As ever, the process of editing these earlier projects led to cutting out anything that wasn’t firmly attached to the spine of the story we were telling. The elastic nature of the web, however, means those fascinating little by-ways can be explored here.
    So, join me here next February, when we’ll visit Catherine’s Cross with the metal detector expert who found himself drawn into Masquerade’s final riddle, talk to former Zombie Rod Argent about his role in the Young Vic’s Masquerade musical and muse on those questions which the hare’s discovery leaves unanswered even today.

As I write this in late November 2009, the Radio 4 Masquerade documentary is still available on-line. It’s way past the iPlayer’s usual one-week cut-off, so Lord knows how long this link will survive, but if you fancy trying your luck, just click here. The RealPlayer prompt you need appears in orange type near the bottom of that page.