(Note that Michael's song, "Love Conquers All," is available only as a digital download - it is not on the Red River Redux CD.

Michael sometimes calls what he does “front porch music,” by which he means music that evolves when it passes from one player to the next, as songs did before radio fixed particular versions in the public mind. That’s how it was for him growing up in Tallahassee, where he spent long afternoons at Ashmore’s General Store in Frenchtown, the city’s black neighborhood, learning tunes from the street musicians and day laborers who gathered there.

One of these was Emmett Goodman, who appeared one day after walking five hundred miles from Miami, because, he explained, an owl had told him to. Like generations of self-taught musicians, Emmett didn’t hesitate to change chords, lyrics, or melodies if he felt alterations would serve the song, and Michael carries on that tradition. The first track demonstrates the process with three versions of a song that has been evolving for more than two-hundred years, falling in and out of copyright. The songs that follow are Michael’s interpretations as he learned or adapted them. The original writers are credited if known, along with other contributors who created variations that led to Michael’s versions.

Also here is the original, extended acoustic-guitar-and-vocal version of Michael's “One Great Mornin,’” a song of fierce indignation in the tradition of Woody Guthrie and infused with the muckraking spirit of Upton Sinclair. In it, Michael takes aim at the cynical opportunists who have “replaced our glory with the tawdry and the crass” in his beloved South. A full-band version of "One Great Mornin'", featuring Woody Paul (Riders in the Sky) on fiddle, will be on the upcoming album Ashmore's Store.