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mid-1800s and the mid-1900s. They called themselves Crackers. People in the US don’t like to use

that term now. A derogatory term towards white people in this country at this point is called a
Cracker, but the white people who lived in the swamp called themselves Crackers at that time and
it had a different meaning. I just want to say this because the entomology changes and everything.
Mostly these were people of Scottish origin, and they were considered by the Americans at that
point to be kind of boasters. People who were braggers. They were braggers, kind of. But it was

okay. It didn’t mean
that it was a bad
thing. It’s like, hey,
they’re just
overconfident and
you can get a better
picture for their

usage of that name
Cracker when you
just think of it in
terms of cracking a
joke. If I crack a joke,

that’s what they
meant by the name
Cracker, not by
cracking a whip over
The Okefenokee Swamp
somebody’s back and
that’s the modern
usage of the term. Oh, he’s a cracker. He’s just a white cracker. That’s not what they meant back

then.

Anyway, any time, Ian, people were living en mass in a certain area, there’s going to be music
made. I used to camp out in the Okefenokee Swamp as a boy scout and I would see these ruins
essentially of old mills and houses and railroad tracks through these islands in the swamp out
there. I’m like, what the heck is this? And of course, nobody explained it to me at the time but fast-
forward to after my ten years of playing with Richie Havens and enjoying the security of that job,

in music when a gig ends for you, there’s no safety net. There’s no (chuckles) retirement plan and
so if you have dedicated yourself to somebody like I did for Richie Havens for ten years, when
Richie retires, there’s this fearful moment of what am I going to do now? What I did is I just asked
myself after a couple of months of pondering and meditation and self-examination, again, what is
it that I can bring to the world? What is it I can bring to the metaphorical table of the music scene

in the whole world that maybe nobody else can?

And I looked back in my roots, and I asked myself I wonder if there was ever music made? I
remembered those railroad tracks in the swamp. Was there ever music made out in the swamp and
sure enough, in our Library of Congress, in the archives in Washington DC, I found a small trove of
recordings that had been made in the late 30s, early 1940s of people who lived out there and some
of the stuff, Ian, was banjo songs and fiddle music and of course, kind of going full circle, for me at

least, all the way back to my days of playing in England, Camden in the Lake District, all the way
up to Newcastle in England and having those days off looking back into my banjo picking style and
now here in trying to survive without Richie.