Today is the anniversary of Dave Carter’s death. On this day each year (and also on the anniversary of his birth) I make a point of honoring his music and expressing my gratitude for his life. What I usually do is play through all the Dave Carter songs I know how to play. But today I can’t do that – I’m away from home all day and busy or driving for almost all of that. Last night I did play some Dave songs, especially ones I’m trying to learn or re-learn (made a stab last summer at The River Where She Sleeps, but which bits of verses go with which other bits and in which order doesn’t stick unless you revisit it regularly). But today I’ll observe this day in a slightly different way, by realizing how completely Dave is integrated into my life. Last night I didn’t have as much time as I would have to play the whole Dave repertoire, because I met up with some friends in the afternoon and our visit ran long. These are people I know entirely because of Dave. Elizabeth actually came up to me at Falcon Ridge long ago and asked “Are you Beth DeSombre”? She’d seen my postings on the D&T list, but I have no idea how she figured out who I was in person. She has since become one of my absolute favorite people. One of the things we were doing, over ice cream, yesterday evening was considering the title for my CD. Elizabeth is a novelist and has a way with words; she was looking through my lyrics to see what words or phrases grabbed as title candidates. (One side effect of that exercise: I discovered that I have four different songs on this CD that mention dust. Who knew?!) And today for much of the day I’m back in the recording studio, near the tail end of recording for that process. This CD would not exist without Dave. He got me excited about music again. I never stopped listening to music, and never stopped playing, but I wasn’t as excited about music as I had been at other points in my life. And Dave and Tracy persuaded my then spouse-to-be that the kind of music I loved was indeed worthwhile; his appreciation of the music that mattered most to me was influential in my ability to imagine that we could make a life together. But I had stopped writing and had stopped performing. And, somewhat oddly, Dave’s death re-started both those things. The performing came first – I started playing at song circles in Dave’s memory. And I knew that other people had to hear Dave’s songs, and one way to make that happen was to play them. (I hadn’t played a single one of Dave’s songs myself when he was alive; Dave and Tracy played them so perfectly that I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing justice to them.) One of the other things I’m doing today is posting publicity about the Dave Carter song circle (9th annual!) that I’m hosting this weekend at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. And I started writing again. It had been more than a decade. The first few songs I wrote were directly inspired by Dave, including Sarah’s Song, which provided the title for the first CD, and was inspired by Dave’s Cowboy Singer. And I had gotten to know Tracy, in the aftermath of Dave’s death, and she played on the CD and became one of my music mentors. I gained others, as I started playing publicly. Even recording this CD (and the previous one) with Dave Chalfant has a direct Dave Carter connection. The reason I even thought to record with Dave was because Adam Sweeney recorded with him and said great things. I met and got to know Adam entirely because of the Dave Carter connection. The other thing I’m doing today is driving from Western Mass to the cape, to meet up with a different set of friends I know through music. (And one of them I also got to know because he wrote a Cowboy-singer inspired song.) These folks I got to know at the music camp I go to in August, something I started doing as I moved more actively back into music after Dave’s death. And last week, I was in New York, invited to give a talk about my scholarly work on environmental standards on ships. The book I wrote on the topic I dedicated to Dave’s memory, because his music was important to me during the era I was researching and writing the book. I never imagined that anyone would notice the dedication – my folk music friends don’t read scholarly tomes about shipping policy, and my academic friends aren’t generally versed in the ways of the folk singer-songwriter world. But the person who invited me to give the talk to her class noticed the dedication and was a major Dave Carter fan. In fact, it was that connection that inspired me to agree to schlep to New York to give a talk to her class. And she asked me to bring my guitar and play a couple songs as well; I played Crawfordsville (which was inspired in New York) and When I Go (I asked her what her favorite Dave Carter song was, and that was the answer). He’s everywhere in my life. I don’t ever play a show longer than a half hour that doesn’t include a song by Dave. I don’t take a long car ride without listening to his CDs. And, in fact, that’s the most direct way I’ll be honoring him today – I have nearly seven hours of driving today. I’ve loaded up the iPod with every Dave Carter song I know of, and that will accompany me on my travels today.