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| EntryNo: |
140 |
| Date: |
Monday
14:50
05.11.2007 |
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Tom |
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Verified: yes
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Notes from the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, NJ:
I met some great folks in New Jersey this weekend. About a year ago our friend Brian Higgins took me to see Matt O'Ree at the Stone Pony. I was really knocked out by the performance. This past Saturday night I spent about ten minutes talking to him before I realized who he was. His first impression on me without a guitar was just as impressive. What a great guy. Check him out if you've never heard him. Also Frankie McGrath from Maybe Pete is the happiest, most upbeat and positive rebel rocker I've ever met. Always a smile and a laugh. I had a great time just hangin' with him. Thanks again to Joe D'Urso who invited me to perform and took first class care of Janet and me throughout the long night.
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| EntryNo: |
139 |
| Date: |
Monday
11:25
29.10.2007 |
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Informed Lurker |
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Verified: yes
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(WYEP Friday A.M.10-26-07)
TRIB music critic,Rege Behe, "Tom Breidings new alubum is the best cd to come out of Pittsburgh in the last 10 years"
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| EntryNo: |
138 |
| Date: |
Wednesday
15:34
17.10.2007 |
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Tom |
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Verified: yes
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Thanks again to all of you for your kind posts on this guestbook! I've updated the show dates and things are rolling along...stay posted.
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| EntryNo: |
137 |
| Date: |
Monday
10:01
15.10.2007 |
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zeke |
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Verified: yes
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Tom,
I've wanted to drop you a line for a couple of weeks but....
The cd is by far your most artistic, creative, and moving work (and that's saying something). Tell the producer he did a great job and really is growing that way.
As the grandson of a coal miner, I couldn't help but think about the life. Your songs took me there.
Thanks for mentioning me from the stage. I appreciate that tremendously.
Let's hope the "gear-hearts" play again - maybe even with fiddle.
Saw your name on the Light of Day website and Backstreets.com
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| EntryNo: |
136 |
| Date: |
Thursday
16:11
11.10.2007 |
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Steve Wilson |
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Verified: yes
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Tommy, just wanted to drop you a line let you know I will need two weeks notice before I can become a rodeo for you. I just know it's going to happen and you sure deserve it!!
your buddy
Steve.
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| EntryNo: |
135 |
| Date: |
Tuesday
19:38
02.10.2007 |
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Tom |
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Verified: yes
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Kathy, Dan, Patti, Jimmy and everyone who has sent personal emails,
Thank you so much for your support and kind words. Things are happening so quickly that it is a bit overwhelming. I need a chance to catch my breath before I leave for New York with Bill on Thursday. Bless you all for helping to make this record a success. I won't forget...
Time to Roll...
Tom
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| EntryNo: |
134 |
| Date: |
Tuesday
13:36
02.10.2007 |
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kathy |
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Verified: yes
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I can't stop listening to the new cd. It is a truly wonderful thing. I am listening in my office and there are a couple companies here that are in the coal business. It is a fascinating thing to watch as people realize what they are hearing. Around here there are a lot of emotions tied to coal - and you touched on every one of them, I think. Thanks, Tom!
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| EntryNo: |
133 |
| Date: |
Sunday
21:44
30.09.2007 |
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Dan Labuda |
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Verified: yes
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Tom,
Congratulations on such a great show Saturday night and an even better CD. I've heard a lot of those tunes down the Leaf, but they sounded great in the final version. I've been listening to it all day. I felt like I was listening to a story more than a group of songs, which is a tribute to your incredible songwriting. I'm sure you made your home state very proud.
My friends and I had a great time last night. Great venue, great show. Glad we could be a part of what I am sure was a huge night for you. Hope to see ya play again soon. Take care...Dan.
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| EntryNo: |
132 |
| Date: |
Sunday
11:05
30.09.2007 |
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Patti Spadaro |
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Verified: yes
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Tom-
Your CD release show last night at Cefalo's was awesome! The band sounded great, and your songs, well - what can I say - they are rock solid. What a fun time. Thanks so much for inviting me down, I really enjoyed playing with you and the band, and with Bill Toms too. Very cool to see your son up on stage too. Can't wait to listen to the new cd.
Take care,
Patti
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| EntryNo: |
131 |
| Date: |
Monday
13:14
24.09.2007 |
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ZEKE |
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Verified: yes
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Decades of history inspire Tom Breiding's new CD
By Regis Behe
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, September 23, 2007
LOGAN COUNTY, W.Va. -- Tom Breiding is standing on the eastern slope of Blair Mountain beneath a canopy of magnolia, poplar, beech and oak trees.
He has come here on this sun-splashed September day with Kenny King, an amateur historian who lives in Logan County and also works in the coal industry, seeking affirmation for a project he's been working on for eight years.
Breiding is about to release "The Unbroken Circle: Songs of the West Virginia Coalfields." While he is a native West Virginian -- born in Wheeling -- he has visited this part of "Almost Heaven" only a few times. Now a resident of McMurray, Washington County, he has reservations about a project that spans seven decades of West Virginia history.
"These are things I read about and wrote about, and now I'm here," says Breiding as King, wielding a metal detector, unearths 30.06 shotgun shells.
The metal casings are reminders that 86 years ago, the Battle of Blair Mountain was fought between 10,000 miners seeking union rights and 16,000 state policemen, deputies and militiamen hired by the coal-mining companies. In this part of the Mountain State, the confrontation remains an epic event, a reminder of the deep divide between the working man and the coal companies. Now, with mountaintop removal mining prevalent in Logan County, activists and miners are once again wary of what is transpiring.
"I have nothing against mining," King says. "It's just the way they're doing it."
This is the backdrop for Breiding's work, which includes the songs "Union Miner," "The Bull Moose Special" and "The Longest Darkest Day," an account of the Buffalo Creek flood in 1972, caused when a mine's gob pile dam collapsed. He says the CD is not a political statement but part of his mission as a storyteller.
"The state motto, right on the flag, is 'Mountaineers Are Always Free,'" Breiding says. "I feel a connection with everybody who comes from the state of West Virginia. That was part of the inspiration. And part of the inspiration is the rebellious side of things. These miners who were called on to take action (at the Battle of Blair Mountain) had to stand up for themselves to do something about their conditions."
"The Unbroken Circle" is colored by bluegrass -- or, as Breiding calls it, "old-timey" music -- a departure from the rock 'n' roll that has dominated his previous releases. And so, Breiding has come to Logan County to road-test these songs, to see if his artistic vision measures up with a reality he is acquainted with but does not really know.
Keeping the record straight
Roger Bryant knows a little bit about music and Logan County history. His grandmother was Aunt Jennie Wilson, a revered figure in Appalachian folk music circles. Bryant has had a few hit songs -- including "There Ain't Enough Whiskey in Tennessee to Drink the Ugly Off of You" -- and has shared stages with Tom T. Hall, Tammy Wynette, Kathy Mattea and Kris Kristofferson.
Most notably, Bryant's song "Stop the Flow of Coal," released in the mid-1970s, earned him national attention including an appearance on NBC's "Today."
So it's with a bit of trepidation that Breiding launches into "Union Miner" in Bryant's office at Logan Country Emergency Services, where Bryant serves as executive director.
Bryant listens intently as Breiding sings about a World War I veteran who feels disenfranchised because he has joined a union.
"Nice piece," Bryant says when Breiding has finished. "You've got it all in there."
Bryant says "Union Miner" and songs like it are important because they crystallize events that tend to fade as years pass.
"As the World War II vets die off, so does the real history, the real truth of World War II," Bryant says. "I think a lot of that is true of Blair Mountain. As those folks die off, the real history and truth of the Blair Mountain battle dies with them. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but it's the natural order of things.
"It's up to people like you and me to keep that alive so we don't repeat the same mistakes we made in the past. And if you go back and look, music is the only thing that keeps a lot of events alive."
Heart of West Virginia
A one-lane concrete bridge, the remnant of a 1938 WPA project, leads to Sunbeam, a small unincorporated community in Logan County. There are many sites like Sunbeam sprinkled throughout the region, with names such as Red Campbell, Freeze Fork, Justice Addition, Rum Junction and Superior Bottom, small communities that are the remnants of mining camps.
This is where King lives with his mother, Christine, in a small, well-appointed trailer filled with curios and knickknacks. There's a sense of warmth and welcoming that exudes from Christine King, 72, as she greets her visitors with stories about growing up in a log cabin in nearby Lincoln County.
"My great uncle had six boys, and he played music and they all played," she says. "They would gather up at our house, out in the country, on Saturday nights, and there'd be music all night."
Other than a battery-powered radio, these gatherings were the family's main form of entertainment. Now Christine King is being asked to listen to "The Obituary of Joe Fry," a song Breiding wrote after discovering the death notice of a miner who died in a Macbeth Mine explosion of 1937.
Left to mourn, a host of friends and kin
and Violet, his beloved darling dear
She might meet him over there, for this poor Violet prays
He planned to be a Christian someday
Christine King pays rapt attention throughout Breiding's performance, locked onto every lyric and note. Yes, she says, Breiding would have fit in with her family years ago.
"Every Saturday night, we'd have music," she says. "One would play fiddle, one would play banjo, and my grandmother would play harmonica, and my mother would play the guitar."
Her voice fades. Something has been brought back to her this day.
Paying history a visit
Breiding spends the rest of the afternoon with Kenny King.
They travel to the top of Lowe Mountain, where coal companies are transforming verdant green foliage into a lunar landscape. They take the same path the union miners walked on Blair Mountain, uncovering artifacts every dozen paces or so. They pause at the gap on Blair Mountain where the coal mining forces fired on the union miners, who dove for cover from the assault of rifles and machine guns.
Everything Breiding tried to portray on "The Unbroken Circle" has become real and tangible in the space of a few hours. His instincts, his trust in the material, have been affirmed.
"I realized I had to show a lot of respect for the people who live here and experienced these things," he says. "I tried to bring some humility to the project, in my whole approach to marketing it and sharing it with others."
Carol Warren, a project coordinator with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, thinks Breiding might succeed in doing more than that.
"If we really don't understand where we've been, it's hard to understand where we are in the present," Warren says. "The coal industry and the lives of the people here have been intertwined for a long time. I think it's important for people to remember the way it goes together, the ups and the downs of an industry that have affected people's lives for a long time."
And continues to affect people's lives.
The emotions, the heartbreak of the Battle of Blair Mountain, of the Macbeth Mine explosion of 1937, of the Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972, all of which Breiding taps into, are revisited upon each generation. Witness what happened at the Sago Mine in January 2006, when 12 men lost their lives, or at the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah, where six miners were never found and three rescuers died in August.
As Breiding sings in "The Unbroken Circle":
It's hard to see beyond tomorrow
when you're living for today
In desperate times it's just survival,
I'll tell you, sir, it's always been that way.
Regis Behe can be reached at rbehe@tribweb.com or 412-320-7990.
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Copyright (C) 2006 Tom Breiding Music, Railroad Town Records, AmeriSon Productions - All Rights Reserved - Pittsburgh, PA USA
Use of the textual information presented on this site may be copied verbatim and distributed.
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