JAMES HIGGINS: Verse, Chorus, Train

James Higgins

Verse, Chorus, Train

© 2003 James Higgins

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An oddly addictive rootsy, acoustic rock cd where washtub basses and cheap, nasty guitars form the background for spooky tales on the road.

notes

A FIELD FULL OF HEDGEHOGS
I'd been thinking about Robert Johnson and all those old dead and gone Mississippi blues guys. When I hear them on crackly recordings I realize I'm not listening so much to the song but to the atmosphere and the performance. Be it good or bad, it is still magical and a thing of haunting beauty. It is a few minutes of time plucked from the wilds of history like a flower is picked and pressed between the pages of a book.
I don't reckon those blues guys were exactly rich. I doubt they were playing top of the range guitars. Most likely some old beaten up borrowed hand me down with barbed wire strings. I figured I could just about afford a guitar like that.
So off I went on safari through Holly Street's junk stores. Down in a dry air basement stacked with odd shoes separated at birth and anonymous dramatic landscape paintings and wardrobes full of painful fashions best forgotten about, I found what I was looking for. A little guitar hardly two feet long, no strings, a broken bridge and no saddle nut. It needed a capo on the fifth fret just to make it be sort of in tune. It was perfect. Twenty dollars.
I hear about top musicians spending thousands of dollars on expensive guitars and equipment trying to capture that authentic delta blues sound. Me, I can't afford that kind of stuff. I can't play delta blues either. But I've got a little twenty dollar guitar that can and I got a few dollars left for a beer.

Years ago I was hitching out of Nürnberg with a different guitar. It was Winter or close to it. I can't remember where I was heading. It was a busy road that went on and on. I seem to remember it was about 10 pm. There were a lot of headlights and traffic lights. There was a heavy drizzle in the air and the road was wet. I'd been walking for hours and I still wasn't out of town. I was getting closer to the city limits though. All around was parkland and forest. When I could walk no more I went into the parkland and settled down to sleep in the shadow of a young tree not far from the road. I don't know how long I slept but when I awoke it was still dark. The road was a little quieter. The park was covered in hedgehogs. Hundreds of them. I'd never seen so many all in one place. A whole herd. I was surrounded by them. It was kind of eerie. Unnerving even. Are hedgehogs predatory? Delicately they curled into timid little spiky landmines as I passed through their midst on my way back to the roadside. I trod carefully, not wishing to start a stampede. Nor did I want to get a blowout in one of my boots.

reviews

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  • I can't stop singing Blowing Down the River! I love it!!
    author: Johnny Blueswell

    I can't stop singing Blowing Down the River! It is so catchy. I love it!

  • author: Sam Hamilton

    Verse, Chorus, Train is an addictive mixture of haunting guitar rifts, catchy rhythms and peotic lyrics. Once again James Higgins has produced his magic and left us wanting more!

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