It's the middle of December and the days are short and cold even in California. Every night we've heard the gentle whirring of a giant fan in the orange grove behind Scott's parents' house, a sign that the temperature has dropped low enough that the air needs to be kept moving so that the oranges don't freeze. There are Christmas lights on houses and obligatory Christmas concerts, poinsettias and seasonal cookies. This is the time of year when you miss someone; the time of ye

This week on Double Americana, we’re performing a song that most American kids know before they know anything. “Oh! Susanna” is one of the most widely performed and well known folk songs in the western cannon and for good reason. It was written by Stephen Foster in 1846 in Cincinnati, OH, when he worked as a bookkeeper in his brother’s steamship company. It was first performed on September 11th, 1847 at Andrew’s Eagle Ice Cream Saloon in Pittsburgh, PA by a local quintet, whi

We are sitting in a hotel room-- pretty much the fanciest hotel we get all year-- in Wichita. This is our third year playing at the city's beautiful botanical gardens. And every year since our first one, we've been trying to convince our pal from Nashville to meet us here to see it all-- the gardens, the hotel, how kind everyone is, and Joe. Joe is the bartender at the event. Our first year, he asked us our drink, we asked for Jack Daniels on rocks, and then we spent the

This week on Double Americana, we learned the old-timey tune, "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy," which is about a cast iron skillet and nothing else (wink, wink). It's a great old tune that we hadn't known existed before we needed to find a food song to pair with the hot stuff we were cooking up in our camper. You know, Beer-Battered Jalepeno Poppers, (eyebrow wiggle, wiggle). As the old saying goes, "If this camper's a-rockin', there's probably just a folk duo inside workin