My old friends know that I once played with Orange County’s premier traditional Irish band, Blackthorn, at a time when the World Wide Web was very young. I was leading the development of UC Irvine’s institutional web presence, so I had access to servers, a Macintosh laptop with a microphone jack, and I was able to check one of the original Apple QuickTake cameras out for a weekend. Ain’t Whistlin’ Dixie was the result. Initially released in 1994, it is, as far as I know, the Internet’s first music album.
This is Ain’t Whistlin’ Dixie‘s third release. When UCI decommissioned Mothra, the server it ran on, I converted the music files to MP3 and re-released it on my ISP’s web servers under a Creative Commons license. It remained available through a succession of ISPs until my current ISP discontinued its web service in 2015. Now that I am in the process of switching ISPs, it’s time for the third release. I hope you enjoy this tiny corner of Internet history, and please let me know what you think.
(By the way, the other members of Blackthorn, Greg and Margie Mirken, Jeff and Gale Peach, and Patti Amelotte, still actively play traditional music. Please visit Three Times Through and Looney’s Fortune for more information.)
