The Indians knew enough to leave the land alone, but the settlers took it apart. After all those thousands of years, the glaciers finally melted away, and wind blew the dust off its melting surface, filling the prairies forty feet thick with loess. Buffalo roamed over it, occasionally chased by the Natives, but for most of the time left alone to fertilize the grasslands behind them as they grazed on the grasslands in front of them. It was a good arrangement, everybody won. The Indians won by being able to eat protein and wear fur. The buffalo herds got bigger despite their predation by other animals and men, and the grass told the whole story, because its roots kept the soil together instead of letting it blow away. It was intact when the settlers got here. These songs that Charlie sings, they are like a tracing in that loess through a little bit of that long time. There’s three or four hundred years’ worth of songs here, the youngest of them is now a middle aged song, still youthful in its current usefulness. Charlie’s the guy whose faith in his fellows makes all those open mics a viable thing in Cleveland, but he is himself also a bard. He is a carrier of four hundred years’ worth of music, some of it his own and some more of it borrowed and bestowed, listened to and heard. Charlie is bigger than his own day because he sees beyond it in both directions. He maintains the touchstones of the past, wisdom sorely needed now, and he builds into a future he can’t yet see and may never get to. Still, he’s walkin’, he ain’t crawlin’. Andy Cohen David Krauss- Harmonica Kate Kooser & Xela- Additional vocals Darrel Branch- Photography Special thanks: My Father, Annie Miano, Matt Harmon, Louis, everyone who supported this collection through kickstatrer Dedicated to the memory of my Mother, Elaine Mosbrook