GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
And welcome back to CoffeeBreak. This is the stand-in for Daybreak until Aug. 23—just a playful little diversion until the grownup version returns. Is it true that Thetford's Sawnee Bean Road is named after Scottish cannibals? Back in 2019, VPR's Brave Little State was looking into odd VT road names, and a listener phoned in: "Last I heard, Sawney Bean and his family were shipwreckers who lived in caves on the coast of Scotland, and ate the people. How did this get to Thetford Center?” It's a winding story: through Scottish legend and English-Scottish history and early Thetford settlement. And at one time it was Swaney Bean. Lots of Thetford locals filled with entertaining speculation... and one historian who opines, “This would the equivalent of naming a road after Charles Manson. Or Ted Bundy.”Meanwhile, here's what's going on in the woods this fourth week of July. Thanks to Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast, it's definitely going to be something interesting—but I prepped this before she finished writing, so you'll just have to go see for yourself.And as a thank-you for sticking with CoffeeBreak so far, here's the origin of the Tuesday poetry habit: Galway Kinnell, standing on his porch in Sheffield, VT, reciting his poem "Daybreak." Next week we'll do Longfellow reciting his poem "Daybreak."
Ayub Ogada, who died in 2019, was a Kenyan singer and master of the nyatiti, an eight-stringed Kenyan lyre. He was also an actor—in Out of Africa and The Kitchen Toto—but it was his pure singing voice and talent on the nyatiti, nurtured by busking in Underground stations in London (where he came to Peter Gabriel's attention), that brought him global notice. Here he is in 1995, with the hauntingly beautiful "Obiero." See you Friday.
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak and sunsets around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
Want to catch up on Daybreak music during the break?
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Banner by Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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