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Miscellany: an introduction

 
Miscellany
Murder Ballads
Secret London

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 its 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.

Added in May 2012: Lots more gallows music

Since the last time I updated this page in March, PlanetSlade readers have recorded six more of the site’s genuine Victorian gallows ballads, and posted the resulting free audio online.
    That means seven of the site’s 16 ballads have now been restored as fully-living songs. Contributors so far include the acclaimed UK songwriter Pete Morton and Sean Breadin of the cult folk duo Rapunzel & Sedayne. You can find links to all the tracks contributed so far here.
    I’ve been promised recordings of a further six ballads from PlanetSlade’s list soon, with contributors on both sides of the Atlantic keen to take part. There are still a handful of songs unclaimed, however, so if you’d like to add your own performance to the project, please check the details at any of the links above.
    Elsewhere in the forest, May also brings three new fRoots reviews to the site, covering work by Miss Tess, The Woodshedders and Little G Weevil. One of these albums is an absolute corker, but to find out which you’ll have to scroll down to the fRoots menu here.