Travels with Barley Read Online Free

heart, happens to also be a well-oiled small business raking in millions of dollars a year.
    All pretty much floating on beer.

    And none of it particularly accidental.
    Joe Gilchrist is an easygoing man with a pleasing Southern drawl traceable to his hometown of Pensacola, Florida. He’s one of those sixty-year-olds who could pass for forty-nine in the right sort of light. He has an open, friendly, mirthful face and an air of mischief about him, an air accentuated by the studiously rumpled casual clothes he wears and the baseball caps or skipper’s hats that he has a penchant for. One impression is that he’s just a mischievous boy that the years have dragged reluctantly into adulthood. He’s about six feet tall and of medium build; perhaps befitting a man who owns a wildly successful tavern, which mandates a fair amount of late night beer sampling, he has the makings of a beer paunch, which he tries to hold at bay by reasonably frequent golf games. He lives alone in a modest woodframe house on a shaded lot on the bay front not ten minutes from the Bama. A couple of cats patrol the porch and a forty-three-foot Gulf Star sailboat, big enough to sleep on but in no measure a yacht, floats tied to a dock out back. His favorite car is a mildly dilapidated 1976 Cadillac convertible. It’s a pretty unostentatious life for a guy that everybody figures is a millionaire.
    Gilchrist is well read, leaning toward Southern literature, and pretty well traveled (he once thought about trying to clone the Bama after being mesmerized by the beauty of Cape Town, South Africa), and something of an authority on the American roots music scene. He can wax eloquent on Stephen Foster, the Yankee who penned Southern minstrel standards like “Oh, Susanna” and “Camptown Races” and is considered America’s first professional songwriter. He can argue persuasively that Mickey Newbury, probably best known for writing the late 1960s pseudo-psychedelic pop hit “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” is the worthy modern successor to Foster.
    Newbury is actually a songwriter of great versatility—Elvis, Way-Ion Jennings, and Andy Williams have all covered his songs—and enjoys a kind of cult following in that gray area of music between country and pop. He is a personal friend of Gilchrist’s, as is the legendary country music songwriter Hank Cochran (who penned, among other songs, “I Fall to Pieces,” made famous by Patsy Cline). Indeed, about the time Gilchrist launched his tribute to beer and hedonism (and commerce) with the Mullet Toss, he also started the Frank Brown International Song Writing Festival.
    The festival actually began as an end-of-summer-tourist-season party for area musicians who had become Bama staples—bands and troubadours, such as the duo Rusty and Mike, who have played regularly here pretty much since Gilchrist bought the joint. A number of them have cultivated an enthusiastic local following by writing and performing an indigenous take on blues, country, and rock that never seems to quite break out the way, say, Jimmy Buffett’s Caribbean-tinged pop did. Gilchrist sought to both broaden the exposure of these local artists, while casting an ever-wider net for songwriting talents who might be overlooked in the precincts of Nashville or Los Angeles.
    What began small is nowadays an eleven-day performance event featuring a wide spectrum of music genres and spread over sixteen venues including the Bama, usually starting the first Thursday in November. It typically draws about 200 songwriters and features songwriting workshops put on by the likes of Larry Butler, Kenny Rogers’s producer, and a hit songwriter himself. One result is that Gilchrist and the Bama have earned serious and respected places in American roots music circles. It’s also true that the festival attracts thousands of music-loving (and beer-loving) fans to the