songs that sounded old. I picked up a copy of Harry Smith’s ‘American Folk Anthology’, volunteered at Caffe Lena, North American’s oldest continuously running folk-coffee house, and never looked back.


While in Cape Breton, I managed to keep my interest in American folk active. I studied Gaelic, and passed the time with a banjo playing Floridian who proved to be a veritable Encyclopedia when it came to American southern-folklore. He told me of a strange religious sect known as ‘Rattlesnake Baptists’, most common in Kentucky and Tennessee. Otherwise known as ‘snake handlers,’ they believed the grace of God would save them from the poison of venom. When it didn’t, the leſt orphans behind. I penned a song about the fate of one such orphan and named him ‘Adenine’.


Te beginning of the Recession coincided conveniently with the end of my Fulbright, so I took the lack of jobs as an excuse to spend a year on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, to finally achieve fluency in the language I’d fallen in love with: Scottish Gaelic. I enrolled at a place called ‘Sabhal Mòr Ostaig’, a farm that had been converted into a


full-fledged university, where one can get a degree in things such as ‘Traditional Music and Gaelic,” all through the medium of the language.


I have to confess the atmosphere of the Gaelic college was quite intimidating at first. Tough my program was geared towards beginners, I found myself in a class with Scottish students who had gone through Gaelic primary school, or had heard the language spoken their entire lives in their parent’s households. Nonetheless, I had come to learn Gaelic, and I wasn’t going to let my fears hinder that goal. I promised myself I wouldn’t revert to English under


any circumstances, and


though it made me a bit of a social outcast at times. I achieved fluency in the language about seven months into the program. I also thrived musically while there, and took Gaelic song classes with a woman named Christine Primrose, a native of the Isle of Lewis in the Western Hebrides and one of the most respected singers in the Scottish music scene.


I leſt Skye with an even deeper love of the language than before, and with plans to attend for a second year, I was devastated when my student visa was refused over a clerical error. Still I felt


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