You know you live in the wrong place when . . .

Back in the early 1970’s a musician named Peter Rowan formed a bluegrass band called Old and in the Way. What drew me to the band wasn’t so much my appreciation of bluegrass music, but the fact that Jerry Garcia was in the band playing banjo and singing. I loved the album, and while I’ve never been what you’d call a Peter Rowan devotee in the same way I was with Jerry Garcia or The Grateful Dead, I’ve listened to, and enjoyed, his music off and on through the years. I’ve always liked him for not only his musicianship and songwriting but for the fact that he started a band and got Jerry to play in it with him.

Flash forward now to January 10, 2015 and I’m listening to A Prairie Home Companion and the musical guest is the Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band. What a small world, huh? The first song he played is a folk song titled Cold Rain and Snow. I know this song because the Grateful Dead played it a lot and this morning I was wondering who actually wrote the song. Is it a Grateful Dead original or is it a traditional folk song the Dead covered?

The only way to answer these types of burning questions is to turn to the ancient knowledge base: Google.

So I google “cold rain and snow” and I learned* that the song the Grateful Dead performed, “Cold Rain & Snow” was a cover of the song “Rain and Snow” by a banjo player named Obray Ramsey. While that’s interesting, it’s not what was interesting enough to make me think I live in the wrong place and prompt me to write this. What I thought was interesting was when I googled “cold rain and snow“, the information that showed at the top of the page – the one piece of information out of 16,100,000 pieces of information related to the combination of words “cold rain and snow“ – was the weather in Minneapolis.

So in a nutshell, you know you live in the wrong place when the one piece of information from the world’s largest search engine associated with the words, “cold”, “rain” and “snow”, is your hometown.

* assuming that everything we read on the internet is true**!

** which it is, right?

Enjoy some music.