A percentage of the proceeds from each event, all season long, will be donated toward the courageous volunteer fire fighters of Bastrop County. 

Conceived, written, directed, and performed by Lucien Douglas

A biographical work on the life of Edgar Allan Poe, including stories, poems, and personal letters representative of the poet's life.

 

Lucien Douglas has enjoyed an extensive career as an actor in professional theatre, film, and television. His work has received critical acclaim in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Backstage, and Women's Wear Daily. He has acted over 100 roles, which include being featured on Broadway with Zoe Caldwell and Dame Judith Anderson in Medea; Off-Broadway at New York’s Roundabout Theatre in Naked (with Fran Brill), Family Business (with Richard Greene &Joel Polis), Candida (with Joan Copeland), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (with John Rubenstein, John Wood and Stephen Lang); and at several regional theatres, including the Kennedy Center, Theatre Virginia, North Shore Music Theatre, and the Clarence Brown Company.

 

Television and film credits include featured roles in Walker, Texas Ranger, Another World, One Life to Live, After the Fall (Hallmark Hall of Fame, starring Faye Dunaway), Medea, A Glorious System of Things, Miss Congeniality (starring Sandra Bullock and Michael Caine), Man of the House (starring Tommy Lee Jones), and Sno Cone Stand (starring Morgan Fairchild and Tony Sirico). In Austin, he received a Critic’s Table Nomination as “Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy” for his performance in Annie Weisman’s Be Aggressive at the State Theatre.

 

Additionally, Douglas is in the process of adapting a DVD version of his solo production, A Dream Within A Dream—Performing the Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, which he created and performed in fall of 2009 for the University of Texas at Austin Harry Ransom Research Center exhibition celebrating the 200 anniversary of Poe’s birth. This performance was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of their “Big Read” series.

When Edo (born in The Hague-The Netherlands 1972) first picked up a guitar in the mid 80s, he already dreamt of being an artist. At this early age, John Denver records, hit parade radio were real driving forces towards music and the art of songwriting. From that moment on, music and Edo were inseparable. He performed his self composed songs, by then already written in English, in crowded school halls. A remarkable amount of applause was heard.

 

During the 90s, Edo moved to Amsterdam and continued his musical search by working in record stores. His musical taste was broadened and reached a deeper level. Surrounded by the CDs in the record store’s shelves he discovered the work of the likes of Jackson Browne, Tom Waits, John Hiatt, Mary Chapin Carpenter and truckloads of other American songwriters.

 

From 1993 to 1994, he toured around Holland in a cabaret duo (typical Dutch art form in which comical sketches and music are combined) and participated in an Amsterdam Performing Arts Festival. This resulted in a place in the semi-final and a public appreciation award. After this, he joined the Amsterdam based stand-up comedy group ‘The Comedy Explosion’, at which he was trained by New York comedian Lewis Black.

 

Cabaret and ‘stand-up’ were great fun and good learning experiences for being on stage. But then again, Edo learned that writing in his native Dutch language put a brake on his artistic flow. To start writing in English again felt like ‘coming home’. ‘A funny thing, but for me, English is connected to singer-songwriters and most popular music like Italian and German is always used for Operas’. 

 

In 1998 and the years that followed, he developed further professionally in the area of environmental consulting. During these years, he joined and left several bands. A red threat was his collaboration with guitar player, singer-songwriter Matthieu Brandt. With Matthieu he started ‘Mindway’, a band of collaborating songwriters in which he played from 2001 to 2006. After his stay in Greece, which resulted in ‘Warning Signs’, the ‘calling of the song’ was louder than any other work ambition. Currently, Edo works part-time as an environmental education adviser and besides this has entirely dedicated himself to songwriting and performing. After touring with a dedicated band of musicians, Edo left for the USA in mid 2008. That extended trip through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada was the major inspiration for the songs of his second release, ´A Sense Of Home´ (2010). This new album is released at the renowned record label Continental Records (CRS: formerly merged with Rounder Europe). 

Singer/Songwriter/Playwright Bobby Bridger has recorded numerous albums on Monument, RCA, and Golden Egg Records. He is the author of four books, A Ballad of the West,Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West, an autobiography, Bridger, and, Where the Tall Grass Grows: Becoming Indigenous and the Mythological Legacy of the American West.

Bridger has appeared twice on PBS’s Austin City Limits, on PBS’s American Experience, on Cspan/Booknotes, C.N.N, Good Morning America,A & E, NPR and the Australian Broadcasting Company. He is the composer of the anthem of the Kerrville Folk Festival -Heal in the Wisdom.

London-based Qube Pictures released a boxed set DVD collection of his highly-acclaimed epic trilogy: A Ballad of the West and a ninety-minute documentary, Quest of an Epic Balladeer, based on Bridger’s life and work. The DVD of A Ballad of the West was a finalist for the Western Writers of America’s Silver Spur Award for Best Documentary Film.

Prolific storyteller, Edward Alexander “Alex”, has lived many lives, which he artfully weaves into in his tales of prose and his poetry. His travels have carried him and his pen many places, He fought fires in Vietnam, came home and rode the rails. In 1969 he thumbed his way to Key West Florida, were he stayed for fives years. There he dove for conch shells to sell to tourist, he started learning the fine craft of woodworking and became part of the literary journal Solares Hill.

Alex was first published in 1968 and started giving readings in coffee houses, bars and Universities, after forty years his reading has become performance art.

The grit of Southern story tradition appeals to him and, while he’s found inspiration in the works of such writers as William Faulkner and William Gay, Alex’s unique voice lends his storytelling its own form and fiber. As he speaks, he carries listeners with him to celebrate tragedies, foibles, simple pleasures, and the humor inherent tales of the human condition told honestly.

As a gifted storyteller, Alex connects us to deep-rooted truths, no matter how outrageous the context, while making us laugh and feel deeply the many dimensions of this experience called, “being human.”

And, through it all, he succeeds in entertaining us greatly!

Today, when not writing Alex works in his wood shop, designing and making one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture.

Alex will read his recent published short story, "The Poisoner" nominated for the 2012 Push Cart Prize.

 

Review from Americana Music Times

Not since Billy the Kid rode that New Mexico and Texas line has someone from the New Mexico side of the border had such an impact on his neighbors in Texas. In fact he might be a decent of Mr. Kid. He does have a baby face. The reality is that Mike Kelly’s new record “Wake the Dead” is a tour-de-force that sticks to the listener like west Texas dust.

 

Now based out of Austin the debut record by the Ruidoso native is going to leave its mark. Kelly is not just another un-tucked flannel shirt-wearing, first name, last name band singers who seems to pop up like blue bonnets in the spring in Texas, and are gone just as fast. At first listen to “Wake the Dead” it could be mistaken for just another one of those aforementioned records. However, after the third or fourth song the record sneaks up and revels something more. True, some of the themes are about drinking or having a fight with a girl, or about the most used Texas songwriter theme of coming back home after a long trip on the road. Yes, all of those same well-used and worn themes are in Mike Kelly’s songwriting on “Wake the Dead.”

 

However, the difference is that Kelly like great songwriters before him uses them well and the poetry makes the difference. With these songs, he gives expression and not just words. Like Townes, Joe, and Guy of a generation before, or Owen Temple, Gordy Quist, and Adam Carroll of today, Kelly delivers the goods in a song even if the song is not some serious tome of universal truth. It is hard to do but he pulls it off.

 

Mike Kelly is a songwriter of distinction with a unique voice, and we can only hope that “Wake the Dead” is a start of something long lasting with more great records in the years to come

Slim Bawb plays “swamp” music. His debut CD “Ghost Dawg” came out April 2005. His latest CD "Calexiana"came out in 2011. It was the RadioFreetexas.org CD of the month for January 2011 .

 

Slim Bawb is Bob Pearce leader/songwriter for the Sacramento based band “The Beer Dawgs” for 20 years. The Beer Dawgs were inducted into the Sacramento Area Music Hall of Fame (The Sammies) in 1998. The Beer Dawgs played their brand of Swamp/Rock/Blues 5 nights a week for those 20 years. (They play reunion shows once a year)

 

Bawb moved to Texas in 2006 & built Swamp Studio in an old shop on the property Bawb & his wife bought in the country outside of Austin. Slim Bawb plays banjo, reso-guitar, mandolin, electric guitar, pedal steel & foot pedal bass.

 

Ron Sherrod is the new drummer & brings the Nawlins thing down home & does some fine harmony singin' also. Bawb also plays & sings with the Chubby Knuckle Choir, as well as solo
shows.

 

Chef Mike Morphew