Half a Foreword-

Maybe call it a Two-word?

Maybe we should start with a far-too-lengthy “Foreword” — in verbatim, this text preambles an available e-book that contains the entirety of what I intend to publish here in fragments over the next few years. You may, of course, save time and money by buying the book itself, loading its ponderous bulk on your hard drive, and plowing through the 2,761 pages at your own pace— you wanna try it, here’s the link:

https://store.bookbaby.com/book/Moonlight-Music-On-a-Mountain

However, the sales records for the book to date do not support the likelihood that you will do so. I’m convinced that recreating the original posting schedule of once a week will make the work more digestible for most readers.

I DO think it’ll be helpful to read the Foreword— but I will cut it in half, and publish here in two parts, to give you a better shot at getting it all down to start with. The text contains some slight historical background, a bit of reflective perspective, and tips for absorbing what I'm tryin' to tell ya about it all.

So, I invite you to read… comment… share… pledge… enjoy!

Friends of The Moonlight–

If you bought this book, chances are you’ve already read a good portion of it— what you got for your money is a collective rendering of 317 weekly emails that I composed and sent to a list of subscribers, promoting upcoming events at Moonlight on the Mountain in Birmingham AL, a live acoustic music venue of which I was the founder and proprietor. These mailings cover the time frame from the first shows in early 2010 through the end of 2016, after which I retired and passed the business into a new owner’s hands.

If yours was one of the two thousand addresses that regularly took delivery of these messages, and you paid attention to them at all, you’ll recall that their prime purpose was to detail the coming week’s attractions, by way of breathless descriptions of each scheduled performer as a must-see talent. Every seven days I issued a mass invitation: “Hey, we’d sure like it if ya’ll would pack a short bag of snackies and drinkies, tuck some folding money into yer pocket, and come on up to The Moonlight to see and hear a show you won’t forget.” The newsletter was initiated as a simple vehicle, with that single function— in time it came to serve more than one purpose, and because so many of you sincerely claimed to enjoy reading it, these emails beg to be archived for whichever of you will find this comprehensive catalog either useful or entertaining.

My mom was more excited than anyone at the prospect of my becoming a writer— she’d dabbled in the language arts herself while in college, and passed to me her love of the English lexicon, whereby we both developed an aptitude for more precisely expressing ourselves. I agreed to chase some vague future in literature, diving into college as an English major, but I never got comfortable with the dictum that writing was a discipline. The idea of strapping myself to a chair in front of a typewriter for a requisite number of hours, inspired or not, just didn’t strike me as the portal to any sort of creative output— and not the kind of a daily professional activity I would naturally embrace.

But you can’t attract an audience to a little acoustic music room if you don’t constantly honk a horn about the exceptional performers that may be seen there. The never-ending need to shill the shows at Moonlight required me to lash myself to the mast of the ship of prose, in that the venue’s mission had to be repeatedly explained to a public who had no experience with any similar enterprise. Small children may be corralled into a classroom, their attentions focused and behavior dictated by command of authority, but free-willed grownups— seeking entertainment and social interchange at their own out-of-pocket expense— required a different sort of persuasion to patronize the sit-down-and-shut-up small-theatre environment we created for our grateful performers.

A bit more historical detail will be helpful here— Moonlight was established in its first Birmingham suburban location in 2003, and persisted for three years as the area’s only acoustic listening room for original music, presenting itinerant and local artists almost every night of the week. Once we got on the map for artists and agents, it was a matter of finding open spots on the schedule for a literal swarm of performers from across the country, and we learned lots of lessons in how to build an audience for this rich vein of musical talent.

Moonlight Music Cafe, Vestavia AL— 2003-2006

As part of an overall promotion campaign, I built a nascent email list and took to hammering out a regular newsletter to its subscribers. This initiative started as a formless gaggle of paragraphs that went out to a hundred or so online mailboxes, in the hopes that a repeated halloo would cultivate a base audience for our shows. Over time, the list of recipients for this bulletin grew, as did my tendency to affect a casual and personal voice in its text– I thought that tone to be better suited to the intimate, homey atmosphere Moonlight maintained for performers and audiences to share. (In time, I may publish those forerunner emails in a subsequent book, as they were a prototype for the later ones here reproduced, and led to the format I finally adopted for the second-generation Moonlight.)

In the gathering of these periodical messages can be seen the fitful growing pains and erratic fortunes of an enterprise based on a frankly ludicrous business model. The original Moonlight Music Cafe, after a three-year hiatus, begat Moonlight on the Mountain (or Moonlight 2.0) in 2010 at a new location, this time completely eliminating food and beverage service, looking for its chief revenue to be derived from ticket sales to the performances. Using a tactic by which I had seen other classic, legendary folk clubs survive, I established an auxiliary non-profit organization, linked by name to the venue, so that anyone who shared the idea of the room as a cultural arts activity could support it financially with tax-deductible contributions.

As the running balance in Moonlight’s bank account rose and fell over the years, a corresponding share of the weekly messages took the form of fundraising appeals to potential donors— in desperate times, the intro paragraphs were simply plaintive cries for more robust attendance by our regular audience. A live music venue is a pillar-to-post proposition under the best of circumstances— much as I wanted to shape the public image of the room as a carefree refuge from the worries of real life, it was necessary to go beggarly on what feels like an awful lot of occasions. I’m glad to say we were gently and favorably indulged by the readership— Moonlight could not have survived very long at all without the generous additional subsidies of its patrons.

So— let me say a few things now that might shed further light on what follows—

Part Two of this “Foreward” comes (afterward), in the next post—- I’m hoping you’ll stick around for it. Many thanks!