Mike Auldridge Made the Grammies

2/11/2013

Slid Under a Motel Door. Still Playing.

How refreshing, in the dark of winter with snow on the ground, to see all that young talent at the Grammies.

My wife and I laughed at the great commercials, geared to a younger audience – not the remedies for old-age ailments we see on MSNBC. Different crowd. Guess the kids on the Grammies don’t have achy knees yet.

I’ve lost all touch with current pop music – got enough Satie and Marley and McGarrigles stocked up to last my lifetime – but the performers were so accessible, so good, so attractive, that we watched right through to the tribute to performers who died in the past year.

I knew about Dave Brubeck and Levon Helm. But there was a shock when I saw the name Mike Auldridge.

It brought me back to the fall of 1972, when I was covering the award ceremony of the County Music Association in Nashville. (Had an interview with Loretta Lynn coming up.) I was staying in some chain motel east of I-65, and overnight some zealous promoter slid a couple of vinyl 33 1/3 albums right under my door.

One of them was Old Train by a sensational fusion bluegrass group called the Seldom Scene. Another album was Mike Auldridge – Dobro. I never turn down anything free, so I stuck them in my luggage and played them when I got home. And I still play them today, particularly because of the dobro of Mike Auldridge on both albums, so thoughtful, spare, clear.

The best track on Dobro is Rolling Fog, credited to Paul Craft and sung by Auldridge, who apparently did not do many solos. His mellow baritone is timeless -- as good as men like to think they sing in the shower.

            Find a place to creep in, underneath my door,
            Whisper to me, while I’m sleeping,
            Make yourself at home.

Knowing that the Seldom Scene was based in Alexandria, Va., I always figured I'd be in DC and notice they were playing in some club, but it never happened. I did interview John Duffey and Dr. John Starling, a surgeon and soloist, on the phone for the Times before their gigs in the New York area, but I never caught them. Why?

I’ve been singing along with the Seldom Scene for a long time, courtesy of my turntable that fascinates my grandchildren no end. I missed the obituary for Mike Auldridge in the Times on Dec. 31 but vinyl is coming back, and I just played Rolling Fog on a damp gray Monday morning.

Thanks to the Grammies for letting me know about Mike Auldridge.

Mike Auldridge, 1938-2012, Dobro Album.

Michael Fremer link

2/12/2013 04:25:38 am

Your vinyl comment caught the attention of my readers. Yes it's making a big comeback especially among young people brought up on MP3s. Hearing vinyl for them is like seeing HDTV for the first time. I wrote this vinyl story for The New York Times back in 1998: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/07/technology/downtime-fans-flock-to-vinyl-in-the-era-of-cd-s.html

George Vecsey

2/12/2013 06:05:28 am

Thanks so much for the comment. I know your byline and have subconsciously followed your wisdom in not chucking out my vinyls. My father-in-law gave me his collection of jazz, etc., when he passed -- Brubeck, Byrd, Coltrane, plus the original Victory at Sea, which is gorgeous coming off the vinyl and my modest speakers. Not sure if the affection for vinyl is real or placebo effect, but I am convinced the sound is better than what comes out of Mr. Jobs' latest doo-dad. Thanks for finding my piece. GV

Alan Rubin link

2/15/2013 05:59:06 am

George

Nice story. Often, it is the little surprises that have lasting memories.

My wife just gave me “The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax: Words, Photographs and Music by Tom Piazza for Valentine’s Day.

He had been a customer in my store and she knew that we had a long ongoing conversation about folk music, 10 to 15 minutes at a time, whenever he was in the store. He knew all the folk singers who I had been listening to since I was a kid.

Did you ever get to the the the Friday night music and dance at the Railroad Depot in Marshall, NC about twenty miles north of Asheville? It was quite an experience. i had never seen a cake walk before. We learned about it from "Blue Ridge Music Trails by Fred C. Fussell, published by the U of NC Press.

Also, I can relate to your grandchildren’s wonder at a record player.

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4/3/2014 09:34:37 pm

Nice try but you could have spared those bytes from the indignity of being sent around the internet. Grow up!! Congratulations and thank you, Mike Auldridge, as those words of yours are the last I will ever read, and you have therefore saved me quite a bit of future time. Strategically, it might make logical sense, but trust is not engendered by announcing Mike Auldridge Made the Grammies. Thanks to the Grammies have a lot in common with Marie Antoinette in their "Let them eat cake" attitude.

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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Mike Auldridge Made the Grammies

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