1919 is the title of the second installment of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, named for the year in which the spoils of war — such as, oh, say, Iraq and Palestine — were carved up and cobbled together in the nation-building visions dreamed up by the European/American powers-that-were after World War I, a process echoed and answered in the montage form of Dos Passos’s own quadro-cameral novel.

And with two decimal places, $19.19 is also the amount of the check that came in mail for me from CD Baby — my first one — for CD and digital sales of The Viper and His Famous Orchestra’s Everything for Everyone.

Don’t tell me not to spend it all in one place. I already have: in mailing out copies of the recording and sending certified mail to the publishers of songs we covered on The Viper and His Famous Orchestra’s live EP from 2000, A Song for All Seasons, the next CD I’m trying to make available through CD Baby. Since this one was all covers, it’s a bit more work in that regard — mitigated somewhat by the fact that two of the five songs are pre-1923 compositions (and thus public domain), complicated somewhat by the fact that one of the songs (Fats Waller’s “The Rumpsteak Serenade”) interpolates enough of Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train” that I’m considering that a whole ‘nuther cover from another mother.

Look for it in about 30 days.

Nothing much to say about this: just an exercise in getting started figuring out how to use the Audacity sound editing open source software I downloaded yesterday off SourceForge.net. It’s the Monkees meets the Music Man meets “Revolution #9” meets Licensed to Ill. Which, all told, just may be the Viper’s Rosetta Stone.

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The sound was recorded straight through the built-in mic on my Dell Inspiron 8600, and it sounds a little funny because I tried using Audacity’s noise reduction feature to get rid of the various fan & hard drive sounds that were tagging along for the ride. Since I was practicing the program’s features, I only said each line twice, thus forcing me to figure out how to cut and paste to stretch each out to four times.

For the June 7, Saturday night concert portion of the 2008 Mid-Atlantic Ukulele Invitational in Annapolis, Maryland, the Paint Branch Ramblers were invited to play un-mic’ed intro, intermission, and outtro sets while the audience filtered in and out (serving the function that “dumb show” acts used to serve in vaudeville — plate-spinners, acrobats, dancing bears, etc.). And, though we didn’t end up having much opportunity to use our much rehearsed “cues” for this, we were also set to play the bands on and off the stage and fill in the cracks between acts and to set up the MC work of that ukulele lady, Victoria Vox.

For set lists, see the Paint Branch Ramblers site for June 6 and June 7.

Link to this at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFOvN5FEhsw

I had the honor of being asked to sit in on jug with Victoria Vox for her own performance of “Ukulele Lady,” which she called in the key of G#. My jug solo over the middle 8 section was fine, but I also made an ill-advised attempt at a vocal harmony on the main line.

I was trying to do the thing that Frank Crumit did in the last pass on the chorus in his 1925 recording of the Gus Kahn and Richard Whiting tune. (Something like what Scooter tries to do in the video above — and dig the Maccaferri-style plastic ukulele played by Hyattsville, MD’s own Kermit the Frog!.) But I think the G# did me in, and I ended up stepping all over the Divine Ms. V’s toes. Guess I should have tried to sing in Ab. I think I’m going to write her a letter of apology today.

I later found out that Victoria Vox was from Wisconsin — in fact, from the Green Bay area right up I-43 from where I hail in Sheboygan (indeed, she appears to be playing a coffee house in Sheboygan in just a couple of weeks). In honor of this fortuitous convergence in Annapolis, I thought we could all listen to The Viper and His Famous Orchestra’s Hawaiian song about East Central Wisconsin, “Winnebago Bay.”

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