Mel and Marie got the better celtic show, a family of six siblings who call themselves Celtic Spring. Fiddling and dancing. I make fun of it all the time, but it was very entertaining. The group is actually from southern California, so theirs is a constructed identity. Nothing wrong with that. Whenever young people are doing old music, they have to study it with elders and old recordings and they always credit their teachers. Gillian Welch who seems so genuinely Applachian was born in Manhattan and raised in Los Angeles. Anders Osborne is a New Orleans singer, but is from Sweden. It's much more about getting it right than where you started from. Bands are almost by definition constructed identities. At Newport I found myself in the middle of an Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros set, a highly participatory affair with lots of jumping and singing along to the choruses. Edward Sharpe is the imaginary alter ego messianic figure of Alex Ebert the band's leader. Hey, whatever keeps him out of rehab.

Other bands we liked at Newport include Pokey Lafarge, April Smith, Dawes, and a great roaming brass band out of Providence called What Cheer?. They reminded me of an oddly misplaced New Orleans band called Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship. I describe them as post-apocalypse cabaret music or hippie grunge refugee gypsy music. All of these are on the August Mix along with great new songs by Frazey Ford, Jesca Hoop, and a great cover by Marc Cohn.

I had some on the job training as a rail bike conductor this afternoon. The conductors take the lead and stop the group at road crossings. The route is about 12 miles round trip. I took some video as we were cruising down a easy grade back to Thorndike. Now I am full of ideas about how to improve the rail bikes and lengthen the route all the way to Belfast and raise the price.