As you know, I don’t have a regular guitar player in the band, so I’m forced to learn more guitar than I ever wanted to know, and in accordance with that aim, I also need my own songbook with our own songs and arrangements in some sort of usable order, and with the songs playable and singable by me.
I am therefore announcing the imminent publication of my Prosperity Path Songbook, which has in it songs we wrote as a group, at Meadow Vista, Grass Valley and Penn Valley, over the past 45 years or so. I want to especially thank all the folks who made it possible. All the credits I know of are listed on each song sheet. I tried to limit the size of the songs to a single page, except in the case of the Government Meltdown Blues, so it’d be easy to use at a gig, recording session, or at band practice.
These songs are licensed for busking where a tip jar is used. If you charge admission or want to record these songs, you MUST have permission, but we’re easy — just ask. We want to know where our songs are going and who is covering them, wouldn’t you???
NOTICE: I have rewritten these songs, to make them easier for me to play.
I have more than 50% rewritten these songs, for which I take full responsibility. If I’ve lost the feel or sense of a song, you can blame me for it. I’ll listen to complaints, but my musical skills are limited to standard open chords, so take it easy on me — a lot of those songs were unplayable by anyone except Parker, Meg, or Jimmi, and that’s a fact.
I’ve made them easy FOR ME to play and sing. If you want the original formats, the original meters, timing and chords as they were, and the original songs as they were sung by Parker more than 35 years ago, you can send for a xerox copy of the Angel Songbook from Iven at, I believe, $35. It does not contain about half the songs my new songbook features.
Myself, I can’t sing them or play them EXACTLY as Parker or Meg or Jimmi or Menlo did — not even remotely like what they did. I just don’t have the guitar and singing skills that they do, so I reworked the songs for my own use, put them in keys that I can easily play, worked out rhythm, meter, rhyme, sense and chord progression changes that are easy, easy, easy for me to play — so easy that even YOU might be able to play them!
I’ve put a solid two months of work into getting this song book together, having already worked on the songs off and on over the past decades, and today, I’m sharing the results of this effort with you. You’ll be able to buy my signed songbook as of today, with our projected shipping date only two weeks away.
I hope you’ll enjoy my collected songs in this new wirebound spiral edition, at only $35 a copy on regular copy paper, and you can make that $45, if you want it printed on heavy card stock. I’ll keep that price as long as I can hold the costs down — printing and paper costs are going up again, and I can’t promise that costs will ever go down to where they were 50 years ago. Things don’t tend to get cheaper and cheaper. Inflation eats everything. Continue reading
