"When it comes to the scientifical parts of music I know nothing about it but I can play and thank God a man who can't read the Bible can pray. A man comes into this world naked and bare. He goes through life with trouble and care. He departs this life and goes we don't know where but he'll be alright there if he lives alright here." - Uncle Dave Macon 

"Re-examine all you've been told - dismiss what insults your soul." -- Walt Whitman"

I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me. 

Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? 
He's all right now. 

The short fortune teller who escaped from prison was a small medium 
at large. 

The dead batteries were given out free of charge. 

A dentist and a manicurist fought tooth and nail. 

A bicycle can't stand alone, it is two tired. 

A backward poet writes inverse. 

A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion. 

Show me a piano falling down a mine shaft and I'll show you A-flat 
miner. 

When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds. 

A grenade fell onto a kitchen floor in France, resulted in Linoleum 
Blownapart. 

He broke into song because he couldn't find the key. 

A lot of money is tainted: 'Taint yours, and 'taint mine. 

A boiled egg is hard to beat. 

A plateau is a high form of flattery. 

Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end. 

If you jump off a Paris bridge, you are in Seine. 

When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she'd dye. 

Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis. 

"Good music gives life to fantasy, to emotions and to the legs"

1. For every mile of road there's two miles of ditches. Be glad you're on the road.  

2. Start slow and tapper off.

3. Somethings have to be believed in order to be seen.

4. Always ride a horse in the direction it's going.

5. Figuratively speaking, I prefer fresh oats over the ones that've already been through the horse.

6. It's a damn good thing we don't get all the government we pay for.

                                    "Buddy"

In the late afternoon on a cold winter day  in '97, while living in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I drove over to pick  my daughter Emily up at school. I remember the temperature that day with the wind chill factor was a frigid 25 degrees below zero! I also remember during that cold snap doing something a friend had told me to try doing and that was to take a luke warm glass of water and toss it into the air outside. What happens is it instantly crystalizes and comes down like fine little sugar granules!  When I picked my daughter up at school, on a whim, I asked her if she'd like to stop by the library downtown & pick out some books. Half expecting her to say "No" I was pleasantly surprised when she said "Yeah". While at the library I  hastly grabbed a new book which had not been checked out previously: "Buddy Holly: A Biography" by Ellis Amburn. When I returned home I paged through the book looking for the part where Buddy, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper (Billed as "the Winter Dance Party)  got stranded in the school bus they were traveling in while enroute from Deluth, Minnisota to Green Bay to play a show at the Riverside Ballroom (a place I've played at many times myself) in Green Bay back in '59. That was their second to last show before playing that fateful night at the Surf Ballroom in Clearlake, Iowa. When I found the part where their bus broke down it said they broke down on highway 51 north of Mercer, Wisconsin, a desolate stretch of road that I know well. It also stated that they estimated the temperature with wind chill at that time to be around 25 degrees below zero(!).  It described how they lit newspapers on fire to try and generate some heat. Carl Bunch, Buddy's drummer got frostbite before they were rescued and had to be hospitalized in nearby Bessemer, Michigan. It went on to say that after being rescued and spending the night at the Crystal River police station, they had to take a train down to Green Bay and cancell their afternoon matinee show in Appleton, 30 miles south of Green Bay, while the bus, which had thrown a piston, was being repaird up in Crystal River. The bus was to be driven and delivered to them in Green Bay later that day. It said they arrived in Green Bay late in the afternoon on Feb. 1st.  How peculiar, that's what the date was that day! I went to the library on a whim, hastily grabed a  biography on Buddy Holly which had not been checked out previously and consequently found four parallels: the place (Green Bay, WI), the temperature (25 below), the time of day (late afternoon) and the date(Feb. 1st).  

During his Grammy acceptance speech for the 1997 Album Of The Year award for Time Out Of Mind, Dylan said:
When I was about 16 or 17 years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three seats away from him, and he looked at me and…I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.
Later, Dylan said...
"You know, I don't really recall exactly what I said about Buddy Holly," said Dylan, "but while we were recording, every place I turned there was Buddy Holly. You know what I mean? It was one of those things. Every place you turned. You walked down a hallway and you heard Buddy Holly records like 'That'll Be the Day.' Then you'd get in the car to go over to the studio and 'Rave On' would be playing. Then you'd walk into this studio and someone's playing a cassette of 'It's So Easy.' And this would happen day after day after day. Phrases of Buddy Holly songs would just come out of nowhere. It was spooky. [laughs] But after we recorded and left, you know, it stayed in our minds. Well, Buddy Holly's spirit must have been someplace, hastening this record."
 
Footnote:
Norman Petty was an independent producer who owned the Clovis, N.M., studio where Holly and his band the Crickets recorded most of their tunes between 1956 and 1958. In addition to taking control of Holly's career and finances, he added his name to the songwriting credits, a dubious but not uncommon practice in those days. After Holly suffered disappointing sales for such tunes as "Rave On" and "It's so Easy," he grew resentful of Petty's control. The cash-strapped musician and his new wife, Maria Elena, visited Petty at the studio to end their partnership, and seek his unpaid royalties. Maria Elena Holly, recounted in an interview that Petty told his young protege, "You know what, Buddy? I'm gonna say this to you. I'd rather see you dead than to give you the money now." Holly almost punched Petty, but his wife's cooler head prevailed, and they returned to their new apartment in New York where they borrowed money from Maria Elena's aunt. In a financial bind, Holly reluctantly joined the lineup of the "Winter Dance Party" tour, with shows scheduled in small towns in the frozen upper Midwest during January and February of 1959, leaving his pregnant bride at home. The troupe traversed vast stretches in an old, unheated bus. For Holly, the discomfort was exacerbated by his legal problems with Petty. After the 11th show of the tour, at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 2nd, 1959, Buddy decided, along with Ritchie Valens and JP Richardson (otherwise known as "the Big Bopper") to take a small plane rather than reboard the bus for an overnight trip to the next venue 400 miles away in Moorhead, Minnesota. The single-engine, four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza was no match for the developing blizzard, making it about four miles before crashing in a corn field and tossing its famous passengers out into the snow. All died instantly, with Holly's skull split open and his chest crushed. He was just 22 years old.
 

"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live." - Mark Twain