Spring in the foot hills of the Great Smokey mountains of North Carolina is a beautiful time of year, and quite varied in weather too: one morning clear Carolina blue skies and refreshing breezes, and perhaps by evening a cold front and a dusting of snow. The music at MerleFest, which takes place during the last days of April, is as varied and refreshing as the weather.

This year, the roster of artists taking the stages on the campus of Wilkes Community College in Wilkesboro, where the festival is held, will include traditional and progressive masters of roots, blues, bluegrass, folk, Americana, and country music. In the years since it began in 1988, MerleFest has in fact become one of the premiere acoustic music festivals in the United States. It was named in honor of Merle Watson, a fine acoustic musician from the area who died in a farming accident, and it is likely he’d consider it a fitting legacy. Merle often toured with his father, legendary guitarist Doc Watson,who is from nearby Deep Gap. The selection of artists over the years has been informed by Doc’s taste, and he calls it tradition plus. “That is the kind of music Merle and I used to play,” he says. “Traditional music, and then whatever else we felt in the mood to play.”

New England based band Crooked Still, whose trademark is taking traditional bluegrass songs and giving them inventive arrangements, is one of the groups who will be doing that this spring. North Carolina based Balsam Range, whose energetic brand of the high lonesome sound hews a bit more to the traditional side of things, will also be on hand. Award winning singer and songwriter Rory Block will bring her powerful take on Delta blues along with her original songs. Folk Grammy winner Tim O’Brien will bring his songwriting chops, and Alison Brown, who crosses borders among bluegrass, folk, jazz, and Celtic music in her banjo playing, will be making a return visit to Wilkesboro. Rising Americana star Sarah Jarosz will be on hand, as will newgrass veteran Sam Bush. Both Bush and Jarosz play mandolin and so does O’Brien, so will there be a fast flying mando face off? Could be — there are plenty of scheduled collaborations on the bill, and when you get that many top notch musicians together,plenty of unscheduled ones too. That’s often the case especially at the after hours Midnight Jam, which is always a sought after ticket.

There is a main stage, a side stage, and places for workshops and more intimate concerts as well. Music vendors and food vendors will be on hand and there are children’s activities and nature walks going on too.
There will be all sorts of fine music in the air at MerleFest come the end of April. MerleFest offers a happy, family friendly festival that’s loved by musicians who come to play and those who come to add their energy by listening, as well. Should you decide to be part of that, you may want to remember that the weather may be as varied as the music.

photograph of Crooked Still taken with permission of the artists and is copyrighted. thank you for respecting this.

The other day, I walked out of the front door of The Oxford Hotel, in Denver, and strolled a few steps to The Oxford Salon and Club, which serves as the hotel’s spa and fitness center.

I didn’t think anything of heading outside, it was a nice day, and I got to walk under the hotel’s fabulous replica of its original wrought iron sign and towards the city’s beautiful train station.

The spa’s layout also struck me as pretty standard: small treatment rooms arrayed on either side of a narrow hallway. And the massage was top notch.

It was only later when I took a tour of the historic hotel—which dates back to 1891—that I learned about the salacious back story of my entirely innocent morning’s activities. It turns out there’s long been an indoor route to the spa, across the second floor of the hotel and down a discreet flight of stairs.

This was especially handy back in the day—when the spa was the hotel’s brothel. The entrance from inside the hotel was a way of maintaining client’s privacy.

The Oxford has been renovated several times throughout its long life, most recently to restore as much of the past as is practical and comfortable, while smartly updating the conveniences—so old-fashioned deep claw foot tubs in the guest room and metal keys for the door have stayed, while working fireplaces have given way to flat screen TVs and iPod docks. And the brothel has become a quite nice spa and fitness center.

The Oxford might be unusual today for its history, but back in the day, an on-or-near-premise brothel wouldn’t have been at all unusual—this was practically a standard fixture of 19th century hotels.  In New York City in 1830, for instance, 80% of houses of prostitution on Manhattan’s West side were within two and half blocks of a large hotel. This fact I found in Hotel: An American History, by A.K. Sandoval-Strauz.

I also learned that one of the earliest guidebooks was an 1839 booklet called Prostitution Exposed, which purported to be:

a MORAL REFORM DIRECTORY, Laying Bare the Lives, Histories, Residences, Seductions, &c. of the most celebrated COURTEZANS AND LADIES OF PLEASURE of the city of New-York, Together with a Description of the Crime and Its Effects, as also of the Houses of Prostitution and the Keepers, HOUSES OF ASSIGNATION, Their Charges and Conveniences, and other particulars interesting to the public.

But was, in fact, a guidebook listing detailed street addresses for said houses of assignation. The best part was the pseudonym the author selected: Butt Ender.

Yes. The book was known as Butt Ender’s Prostitution Exposed.

A moral reform directory, indeed.

Fifty years ago, on a snowy winter’s day, Robert Zimmerman arrived in New York City. At first glance, he appeared to be just another college dropout drawn to the bohemian life of Greenwich Village.

But he was a man with a mission. Armed with a guitar and harmonica, this wanna-be Woody Guthrie didn’t waste time making his mark. On his first day in the city, he lined up a gig playing backup harmonica at the Café Wha? where he’d (in his words) ‘blow his lungs out for a dollar a day’.

Becoming a fixture around the village, Robert or Bob as he was known as, started writing songs and playing them at the many small coffeehouses, bars, and folk clubs.

A recording contract followed, he changed his name to Bob Dylan, and soon he was being hailed as the spokesman of his generation.

The rest, as they say, is history. But it’s a convoluted history, full of twists and turns, as both the man and the city continue to reinvent themselves.

Anyone wanting to get the feel for the New York of 1960s and 1970s really should read Bob Dylan’s New York by June Skinner Sawyers.  A Roaring Forties Press publication, this recently release book is offers a fascinating glimpse into the man, his time in New York City, and the role the city played in his music.

Complete with street maps highlighting the places – from fleabag hotels to coffeehouses and folk clubs and concert halls – that influenced the singer, this book would make the perfect walking guide for anyone wanting to follow in Dylan’s footsteps.

Dylan called New York a magnet that draws people to it. For Dylan fans, this book will do the same.

(Disclaimer: The writer was provided with a complimentary review copy of the book)

By Michael Shapiro, photos by Michael Shapiro and Jacqueline Yau

Attending the Immrama travel literature festival in southern Ireland, an author catches up with the interview he missed long ago and rubs shoulders with writers and local characters in a corner of the country that’s beaten back “progress.”

“Trying to interview Dervla Murphy is like trying to open an oyster … with a wet bus ticket.”

That line came from the 2010 documentary, Who is Dervla Murphy, about the intrepid Irish travel writer. In 2003, I’d hoped to go to Ireland to interview the author of Full Tilt and Eight Feet in the Andes for my book A Sense of Place, a collection of conversations with the world’s leading travel writers. But each time I went overseas to conduct interviews for the book, Dervla was on the road.

Then something serendipitous happened. Last spring, the organizers of Immrama, a travel literature festival in Ireland, contacted me and asked if I could put them in touch with Jonathan Raban, who appears in A Sense of Place. I said sure and asked where the festival is.

“Lismore, in County Waterford,” said Mary Houlihan, the vivacious organizer of the festival. “Down in the south of Ireland,” she added graciously, in case I didn’t know.

“Lismore,” I rolled the name through my mind and then it clicked. “Isn’t that where Dervla Murphy lives?”

“Indeed it is,” Mary said.

Before she finished that short sentence I was mentally booking my airline ticket.

“So Dervla will be headlining the festival?” I asked rhetorically.

“Well,” said Mary, “She’s not much for publicity. She usually disappears during Immrama. But we have some other fine writers this year.”

Sure they do, I thought to myself.

“Jan Morris and Pico Iyer are coming, and so is Sir Ranulph Fiennes.”

I almost fell out of my chair: two of the world’s most accomplished authors about place joined by the polar explorer who crossed the length of Antarctica by foot and ran seven marathons in seven days on seven continents.

Fiennes was the first person to reach the North and South Pole overland, but here’s what I remember about him: he pulled a sled from icy waters during an attempt to walk solo to the North Pole in 2000 and suffered from frostbite on his hands. Upon his return home to Britain, he found the pain untenable and, unwilling to wait for a doctor, took a Black and Decker to his fingers to cut off the dead tips.

“Maybe you could find a way here,” Mary said, explaining that Lismore offered more than just the festival. The town dates to 636 and is home to Lismore Castle, she said, which overlooks the River Blackwater, known as Ireland’s Rhine.

And then she hooked me with a passing remark: the Celtic Tiger never quite made it down to west Waterford. The pubs, inns and landscape have remained virtually untouched by the whirlwind of prosperity and modernity that had whipped through Ireland, transforming Dublin and other Irish cities before disappearing in a deluge of debt.

The timing of the festival was perfect: I could combine a visit to Dublin for Bloomsday, held every June 16 when just about everyone in the city dresses up as characters from James Joyce’s Ulysses, with a trip to Lismore for Immrama. I booked tickets for myself and my girlfriend, Jackie.

Going Full Tilt with Dervla

Two months later I’m in Dervla Murphy’s garden, hoisting a couple of frosty pints, her three little dogs climbing all over us. It’s true Dervla rarely does interviews these days, but not because she’s aloof or introverted; she’s about as far from pretentious as you can get. “It’s just that I hate people fizzing about me,” she says in her booming Irish brogue, explaining her plan to leave for Dublin the next morning and skip Immrama.

She’s wearing a light blue jacket over a navy sweater with a button that says “No War.” Her dog, Wurzel, has shed all over Dervla’s dark pants but she doesn’t care in the least. Just over a year shy of her 80th birthday, she appears fit and strong enough to ride her bike from Ireland to India, which she’d done almost a half century before as chronicled in her book, Full Tilt.

Many travel writers end up settling far from home, such as British author Pico Iyer who lives in Japan. Others, like Jan Morris of Wales, are so deeply of their place it’s hard to imagine them living anywhere else.

Dervla, as everyone in town calls her, belongs in—and to—Ireland. “I’ve seen so many really magnificent landscapes in so many different countries, but I suppose I just feel I belong here,” she said. “There have been so many changes in Ireland, many changes for the worse during the last 15 or 20 years, with quite unnecessary motorways here there and everywhere, but this little corner of west Waterford” is almost unchanged. “It’s a feeling for the landscape really, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.” After traveling over rhododendron-blanketed green hills with their gentle streams and graceful trees to reach Lismore, I understand why Dervla feels so at home here.

We go on to talk about travel, writing, and her remarkable life: how at the age of 10, she sat on Round Hill, just over a mile from where we’re speaking, and vowed to pedal a bike to India. About how she took her tea from a mug at a time when ladies used a cup and saucer, her penchant for blue jeans, her decision to have a child out of wedlock at a time when that just wasn’t done.

After a couple of beers, I ask Dervla where the bathroom is. She extends an arm toward an untended and overgrown garden humming with insects. “Go wherever you like,” she says with a laugh. She couldn’t have made me feel more at home.

The interview complete, I go get Jackie at our hotel, a block away, and Dervla gives us a tour of her house, The Old Market, a collection of stone buildings surrounding a courtyard that served as Lismore’s marketplace for centuries. The market closed in 1909 and had fallen into disrepair.

Dervla bought it in the late 1970s and found it “in complete ruin, no roof and rubble piled up inside, earth and weeds growing out of the wall.” She shows me rusted wagon wheels that were left behind, an ancient scale and other decaying remnants from the market’s past.

In her study, which dates to the late 17th century, is a typewriter—not a computer—that she uses to compose her books. It’s covered by a Tibetan flag. She’s too humble to mention it, but later I learn the flag was a gift from the Dalai Lama. The guest room, where Michael Palin stayed while in Lismore, was once the market’s “piggery.”

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It is national poetry month in the United States. A while back, I reflected on songwriters as travel writers. Poets whose work appears on the printed page have places in travel writing and reading, as well.

Consider Homer, for example. This ancient Greek poet wrote a story in verse which has given its name to a whole travel idea: The Odyssey.

Then there is Robert Frost, whose poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening surely evokes a New England winter, even if you’ve never seen snow. Robert Burns, remembered for his love poems and bawdy stories, also wrote movingly of the landscape of his native Scotland in The Westin Winds and My Heart’s in the Highlands. Rabindranath Tagore, William Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda, WB Yeats — poets widely known and lesser known, from every language, land, and culture, draw on ideas of landscape, journeying, and homecoming in their work, in ways that help inspire, define, and reflect on travel.

Popular television travel host Samantha Brown is among those who carry a book of poetry on their travels. Do you? If not, US national poetry month might be a time to try out adding a few poems to your travel kit.

You’ll want to be getting that travel kit ready, too: Perceptive Travel will be offering you a chance to win a trip around the world and other travel prizes. Details coming up soon. Subscribe to
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