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booklet, ending up with those Rabelaisan figures decorating the package. Can't say
we ain't Old Time!
BiTS: How are you going to promote it. Travelling road show!?
AC: I guess the answer is yes, I don't know about those other guys, but I'm going
to tour till I drop. I'll be working some with Eleanor and mostly with Eleanor and
Bill both this year. Bill's a college teacher so he's kinda strapped in much of the time,
but he's also the chair of the department so he can schedule himself as he likes as
long as everything's covered.
There's other people I've got recorded that
I want to bring out, and I want to bring all
the out-of-print ones back into print. And
I want to write a book about zithers, and
a history of the Folk Revival from my point
of view. Larkin taught lap dulcimer for
forty years and left a ton of tabs. I want to
get those in order and get them scanned
into a database like The Seisun is for Irish
fiddle tunes.
At least I know what I'm doing for the rest
of my life...
BiTS: I thought at first that Eleanor and
Bill, both with the same last name, Ellis,
must be husband and wife, but I found that
is not true. Please tell me about them.
AC: As for the Ellises, here's what
happened: I was running the Kent State Folk Festival in 1989 (yeah, that Kent State)
and I invited each of them- Eleanor lived in Takoma Park and Bill was living in
Cincinnati - to play for me. My person of all hotels assumed they were married and
stuck 'em in the same hotel room. Bill and his then-wife arrived at the hotel room
to find Eleanor changing her strings. Once they got one another's name they figured
out what happened.
As for the recording itself, that happened in a bunch of different ways over the
course of a couple of weeks. River's studio is in downtown Burlington (VT), and it's
a maze of a building you could get lost in, with several floors. The recording
equipment is on the first floor, remote from where the players are, so we had to
intercom back and forth. The one where I played piano, ‘Won't That Be A Happy
Time’, the piano was on the first floor but around the corner and down the hall and
around two more corners from the recording devices. Most of the recording was
done upstairs, in pairs, as singles, as a trio, sometimes with Steve playing bass and

