A bit of our opening number on the Main Stage: a three-time bouree from France, with a bit of a music box feel

Here we are on the wharf at Lunenburg Nova Scotia... it was so beautiful we could hardly concentrate... playing Alison's tune Guy in the Red Thong

A song about some sailors who are so hungry after seven years at sea that they draw straws to see who will be eaten. The captain draws the shortest straw but he asks the cabin boy to die for him. The cabin boy asks only that he be allowed to go one more time up to the crows' nest... where he says (or says he sees?) (or hallucinates?) Turkish ladies dancing, women tending doves in the gardens of Babylon.... the most beautiful of which he vows to marry and sleep with in the captain's cabin. What happens after this, you decide.

A woman's dying husband sends her over the mountains to buy the best wine in Paris. Returning, she hears the bells tolling for him. So she goes into the kitchen, drags him out into the yard, and says "Crows, pigeons, come and eat: here is my husband!" Well, what more can we say. A beautiful morbid song -- sung at the Acoustic Stage at Mill Race Festival, Cambridge Ontario, August 2009.

At the banjo workshop, Laura plays a tune she wrote... with Alison on hurdy gurdy and Sheesham Crow on jaw harp

Ferme Neuve, Québec, July 09

French dancing at Chants De Vielles Festival, Calixa-Lavallée, Québec.