Buddy Guy drove his musical Mack truck right through the center of a packed Boarding House Park this past Saturday night and left everybody staggering from the blues wallop that he put on us. We go to the pavilion on these nights like lowly moths drawn to lamps, hoping to…
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“Lowell Poster” by Richard Marion (c) 2013 See more artwork at www.richardmarion.net
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I have seen them all, and the 2013 Lowell Folk Festival was a five-star event, if that’s the highest ranking possible. Now, can I saw something about the setting? The downtown looked fabulous. From Market Street to the Boott Cotton Mills, and in between, the historic district offered stunning views…
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With the Lowell Folk Festival coming this weekend, here is some background on the event. As some of our readers are aware, for the past two years I’ve been writing a book about the origin and impact of Lowell National Historical Park. What follows is an excerpt from a chapter…
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In the past few years at the Lowell Summer Music Series at Boarding House Park, I have been struck by the superlative musicianship of the artists presented by the organizers, Lowell National Historical Park and the Lowell Festival Foundation. Night after night the featured artists and their bands demonstrate the…
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The Boston Symphony Orchestra opened its Tanglewood season this past week, and my wife and I were lucky enough to attend Sunday’s performance by the Pops Orchestra with a special guest, Country music star Vince Gill. We had not been to a concert in the Berkshires for about 20 years,…
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Reporter Joel Kost in today’s Sun newspaper puts some gas in the tank of a long-time effort to get the US Postal Service to issue a commemorative stamp in honor of author Jack Kerouac. One of this blog’s loyal readers, Dean Contover, has been leading the stamp charge for about…
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In the end it was like church. A generational church. A church of humanity. Of joy. Of suffering. Of soulful community. She had brought us together one more time, and there was a poignancy to it because a lot of us who were there are getting “up there” and have…
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I don’t know if the program was un-partisan, bipartisan, non-partisan, or post-partisan, but last night’s uplifting presentation by Former First Lady Laura Bush and her daughter Jenna Bush Hager left me feeling that Mrs. Bush has a lot of good work left to do in what she called “the afterlife”…
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Following is another excerpt from my book about the origin and influence of the national park in Lowell, which was written for the National Park Service in 2011-12. If the publishing process goes as planned, the book should be available in spring 2014. ‘Duey’ Kol, who speaks in this section,…
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