hensley farms

Ater the holiday I'm remembering a lot of Fourths of July from my checkered past. Here are a few. May the Fourths Be Witchoo 

1957 or so—I played at the Bloomington (Indiana) Country Club. It was an unpleasant evening. climaxed…

Okay, the last year and a half have not been exactly normal for most of us. The Diamondville crowd got a bit of a head start on that, since our leader had to retire at the beginning of 2018, so…

The Indianapolis 500 is
(a) a really big band,
(b) a protest group soon to go on trial, or
(c) almost three dozen autos driving around in a circle for a few hours.

If you answered (c) then you are…

Here is a snapshot from April,1962. If your vision is keen, you can spot me hidden behind banjo player Neil Rosenberg with my bass. It’s a performance by our group, the Pigeon Hill Boys at the Ann Arbor Folk Music…

I meant to post this yesterday as an observation of Dyngus Day, but I'm a day late. So sue me. Actually, I haven't posted anything here lately, but there's a reason for that, and it's not a sad one, I'm…

Four decades ago, we were working hard, puttling together a piece of moviemaking titled "The Jazz Singer." There are a lot of stories about the making of the film, and many of them are true. But here's my favorite clip…

Sadness today, at news of the passing of veteran troublemaker Simon Stokes. Google him if you're not familiar with the name. I'm including a video I completed recently of a track we recorded together some years ago. Working with Simon…

It was nice to be confronted with this memory from 1986. Alan Lindgren and I were co-musical directors for the CBS special, which was done at Television City, at Beverly and Fairfax. I arrived early one afternoon for rehearsal, just…

During our final tour, in April of 2017, we played Fort Lauderdale, Florida, never one of my favorites, but it's not my tour. And we weren't staying in Ft. La-di-da, we were up the road in Hollywood. Yes, there's a…

The picture shows an imagined visit of Kurt Vonnegut and Andy Warhol to the Hollywood Bowl, for no reason. This story is about an altogether different night, one when our band was hanging around backstage before a show at  the…

For people interested in such things, here's a video that turned up recently on the web, a song only done in our show a few times--it's titled "Wake Up The Band," here, and it's based on a song from my…

Sad to read today of the passing of Regis Philbin, a real TV icon. I liked Regis in general, but specifically I liked him because one night in 1986, he and his then-broadcast partner, Kathie Lee Gifford, came to see…