Hope this finds you all doing good.  We're fine and enjoying having time at home as well as doing some weekend roadwork. It's a beautiful time of year here and we're spending a lot of our home time outside working on the garden and cleaning up after last spring's ice storm.

On the musical side of things we've recently had some fun gigs away from home, some nice music gatherings around home and we're getting some new original material together.  All in all, we're feeling extraordinarily lucky to live in such a beautiful place to have music as our avocation and our vocation.

There are a couple of new instruments around the house.  Robin is working away at a 1923 Gibson A4 model mandolin that he bought from Tony Williamson.  And Linda has added to her banjo collection by purchasing a Black Diamond open back from the Deering Banjo company.  Linda is already usingthe new banjo on stage.  Who knows if Robin will ever use his mandolin on stage.  When you're working with folks like Jimmy Gaudreau, Jim Watson, Tony Williamson and Chris Brashear, all of whom have their mandolin chops down pat, it's probably best that the old A4 stays in the living room.  These two instruments have surely brightened up our lives.

There a few updates concerning the fifth annual Fortune Williams Music Festival.  On July 9 at 10:00 a.m., tickets will go on sale for those only on our mailing list and those on Jimmy Fortune's.  This gives you all first dibs on the best seats.  To be able to buy your tickets you'll have to use this year's presale code which isis FWMFO7. Tickets will be sold at the Frontier Cultural Museum and the phone number is (540) 332-7850.  The tickets will go on sale to the general public on July 16.  We continue to be excited about this year's lineup.  For information go to www.fortunewilliamsmusicfestival.com.

We're looking forward to this summer's work starting this upcoming weekend at the Montpelier Arst Center in the DC area.  The following weekend we'll share the bill with Chris Thile and his new band at The Festival Of Arts and Music in South Bend, IN. That'll be a great show. The Music Mill in Indianapolis is a fairly new restaurant that has a great lineup of artists playing there.  It'll be fun to get back to Indianapolis.  We haven't played there in a few years.  And we're really excited about playing the Kate Wolf Festival.  We knew Kate and have been wanting to play that festival ever since it began.  One final note, we'll be on the A Prairie Home Companion cruise to Norway in July.  We were listening to this week's show and heard that there are still some cabins open.  If something like this interests you check out http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/features/cruise/2007/ for information.  This will be the third APHC cruise for us and they are a lot of fun.

And finally, we got an ego boost when the legendary Country Music author, Chet Flippo, wrote the following in his latest www.cmt.com "Nashville Skyline" column: "I like to hear the unexpected, the songs that flow from one to the next, so that you might jump from Hank Williams to Lucinda Williams to Don Williams to Tex Williams to Hank Williams Jr. to Hank Williams III to Holly Williams to Robin and Linda Williams.  And it all makes good musical sense."

We had no idea Chet Flippo had ever heard our names. We're amazed.

Hope to see you at one of the stops along the way.  Go out and support live music.  It's good for the soul.

Your pals,
Robin and Linda