Album Notes

A Brief Historical Sketch of The Westsylvanians:

IN THE LATE 1600s, restless settlers began pushing into the heavily wooded region west of the Allegheny Mountains. Loners by nature, they blazed idiosyncratic paths of destruction and built crude, rough-hewn shacks and poorly planned, unremarkable towns. Their rude and antisocial nature was fueled by cheap homemade whiskey, which also made them quarrelsome. Indian warriors sometimes ran roughshod over the territory. Every so often a war would break out with the French, the British, or both. And let us not mention the ruthless Québécois.

FOLLOWING the relatively minor Blacke Gloome of 1774, an uneasy peace took hold. Bored, the settlers soon picked a fight called the Whiskey Rebellion, which was summarily crushed by George Washington and some 13,000 federal troops. In the confusion, much of the whiskey was consumed.

THE NEXT YEAR, still recovering from their collective hangover, the region's inhabitants politely asked the Continental Congress to establish a 14th state, to be called Westsylvania. Congress, still irritated, claimed that the request had been lost in the country's early, rudimentary mail system.

YEARS PASSED. Generations of disagreeable Westsylvanians gave way to more refined, polite, and sober Westsylvanians, who birthed new generations of rebellious, godless drunkards, who somehow raised thoughtful, even-keeled, hard-working types (the drinking gene, it seems, tends to skip generations).

IN THE 1970s, the Pittsburgh Steelers won four Super Bowls.

IN 1988, a new generation of Westsylvanians began making an unholy racket. Though most live in exile, irregular meetings continue to the present-day. A thousand or more recordings are said to exist, and yet only two studio albums could be located as of this writing: Allegheny Front and Dusk Falleth, both released on the estimable Twolick Recordings label.

WHILE ITS MEMBERS ARE LEGION, three Westsylvanians are keystone. Matt Calvetti lives in Pittsburgh. Joel Huzinecz lives in Ohio. Jeremy Lloyd lives in Tennessee. They take an inordinate amount of pride in how quickly they respond to e-mail sent to the following address: westsylvanians@gmail.com.