I'm playing guitar again but I lost all of my picks, and I'm too lazy to get any more. Thus I'm working on my (dubious) thumb and my (more dubious) fingerstyle playing. Wes Montgomery and Preston Reed I am not. However, below the Brown family crest, which in case you are wondering consists of a disheveled stack of books and two crossed but half empty bottles of Cutty Sark, is our hereditary motto: Even a Blind Pig Gets an Acorn Once in a While.

In the spirit of that motto I can report that roughly ten years after my first attempt to learn it, this evening I played the John Fahey arrangement of "In Christ there is no East or West" well enough that had I been on stage I would not have been mortified. There's one really tricky lick getting from a G to a C that has been holding me up since roughly when VA linux was a good investment. This, of course, is Fahey's easist tune by multiples, so I think I'll quit while I'm ahead with him. I think I'll try a Mississippi John Hurt song or maybe something by Elizabeth Cotton other than Freight Train. I'll play it for you if I make it to forty.