85 Comments

Welcome to Ireland Patti! Driving 100 miles for one of your smiles. Can’t wait to see you again . Caroline Hen x

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Thank you Patti! I love to dance and my sister Diane taught me how, Jersey Style! One of Diane's favorite songs in Under My Thumb and I think of her every time I hear it and many others songs too. Thank you for bringing Jackson into the world and onto your stage, he is a beautiful presence as is Jesse.

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Dear Patti, thank you for this post. I sang and I danced. Like you once said about girls from South Jersey us girls from New York we can dance!

For some outrageous dancing may I suggest the movie “The Hairdresser’s Husband”. Thank you.

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Ask the Angels is one of my top barefoot dancing around the house songs. It gets me up and going every time. And the song that breaks me into tears every time is The Beatles’ blackbird - tears of mourning and of hope for my own health and the loss of my brother.

The live performance that filled me with tears of awe and inspiration was actually on the set of I’m Not There, watching Cate Blanchett transform into Dylan. It is an experience I can call up from memory as in that moment again.

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A song that has brought tears to my eyes recently ( and I feel like I’ve been crying all the time ) is Johnny cash singing ‘the first time ever I saw your face’ it’s so very beautiful,and he recorded it later in his life when his voice was still powerful in a completely different way ‘

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I grew up in Northern Ontario. This song, Helpless, is dear to me. It is always on my mind in the deep of winter. There's no winter mood so bleak that can't be lifted by the poignant sadness of that song.

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Samba Pa Tì and Midnight Train To Georgia got me crying today. Nearly the anniversary of my talented brother’s death. A gifted musician, guitarist, the demons got him, finally. It occurs to me he quit music because it reminded him too painfully of the things he didn’t have. Like love. He had it, he just might not have known it. I miss him.

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Thank you for Helpless. A song I used to sing as a teenager driving in Baltimore with the heat on and the windows down. xx

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“I praise the dance, for it frees people from the heaviness of matter and binds the isolated to community. I praise the dance, which demands everything: health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul. Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people, who are in constant danger of becoming all brain, will, or feeling. Dancing demands a whole person, one who is firmly anchored in the center of his life, who is not obsessed by lust for people and things and the demon of isolation in his own ego. Dancing demands a freed person, one who vibrates with the equipoise of all his powers. I praise the dance.

O man, learn to dance, or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you.”

— Unknown (often falsely attributed to St. Augustine, original version by George Goetsch, later modified by an unknown author)

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patti on hearing you for the first time i found baudelaire and a world full of words i never knew were out there, including your majestic verses, thank you - horses, horses, horses xx

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Thank you, Patti. Every time you make me feel much more alive

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Music has gotten me through this pandemic. I play hours of playlists on my laptop while working from home, it's an eclectic mix, new and old, totally mood. And I draw every night before bed, that is how I stopped clenching my teeth in my sleep. One 10-20 minute sketch, lately I've been drawing my titles from Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower while listening to Jimi Hendrix play it...his guitar gives me chills, it's so powerful.

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Same. Knit to my playlists in the wee hrs

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How lovely it is to see a mother and child playing music together. Your son's guitar is a voice in itself, in harmony with your singing; he is indeed stoic, his warm energy flows straight out of the strings. Thanks for your words, as always.

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Pata Pata by Miriam Makeba

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Hummin' - Live by Cannonball Adderley Quintet. Always

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Cry: Tom Waits; songs by John Lennon on Double Fantasy; Bowie’s Changes and Space Oddity; Joni Joni Joni; Billie Holiday Strange Fruit; Ave Maria.

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