Barbara grew up a couple of blocks below Prospect Park on Terrace Place. She is half Syrian and half Italian, bakes like a demon, and has way over 100 ribbons from the state fair here to prove it. She is a marvellous cook, makes a pan of biscuits'll make a dead man smack his lips, but cannot learn to make pan gravy from drippings. Or will not. She is big on eating and cheerfully supplies appetite whenever I make gravy.

I am the Irish-English member of the family, going back to a Peter Patrick Butler who came to Georgia from Ireland in 1741 and traded a bolt of linen for a plantation. He never was a great businessmen, and the soil there was so rocky that, if you'll pardon the expression, you couldn't raise hell with an Irishman.

Tell you what, fatso. I'll post a song I wrote in imitation of an old barrelhouse song. I stole the chord pattern almost exactly from Bo Carter, who by that time was way too dead to care too much, and wasn't using it at the time. Stand by.

http://www.soundclick.com/mikeamason