In 1973, a friend of mine returned to Southern California from a visit to a Wiccan gathering in the Bay Area telling me about a musician he had met by the name of Gwydion Pendderwyn who had a songbook full of wonderful music all about the Craft. My friend gave me the address of an organization called Nemeton from which one could order the book. So, for the extravagant sum of $2.50 plus postage I did and set about learning to sing and play some of the songs.<\/p>\n
Two years later, I was spending a few weeks guesting in the home of a Gardnerian couple known as Athena and Dagda. While I was there, Gwydion came to visit, and I played and sang for him including an arrangement I\u2019d done of his Harvest Dance<\/em> for Appalachian dulcimer.<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Z0MrLNzspuc<\/a>\n Gwydion was delighted, especially because I did his songs in a bouncy, folksy style. It seems he\u2019d recently been visiting other Witches on the East Coast, and they, too, had sung some of his songs for him. But they sounded, he said, \u201clike Presbyterians;\u201d everything was slow and solemn and far too reverent. It made him crazy! What he\u2019d really like to do, he told me, was put out an album of the songs to show people how they should sound. But, he didn\u2019t have the first notion how to go about it.<\/p>\n \u201cFunny you should mention that,\u201d says I.<\/p>\n A few years back my partner and I, along with many of our friends, had spent an entire summer working as backup musicians and singers on a very bad country western album. The album may have been a disaster, but the experience was invaluable. And, since then one of the friends we\u2019d worked with had bought himself an enormous array of then-high tech recording equipment and was running a small business out of his home cutting demos for other struggling hippie musicians.<\/p>\n