Lyric contest winner: Dumb as Dirt and Slick as Oil
Adam Silverstein and I are still working on our double album, A CAPITAL IDEA: GILDING THE AGE. Among the stories we tell on the album is that of Coal Oil Johnny, an historic figure from Rouseville PA, in Venango County, not far from the county seat of Franklin, where I grew up, and Oil City, where my sister Katya currently lives. I won’t go into too much about the song except I’d had the idea to write about Coal Oil Johnny since about 1995 or 1996, whenever my mother moved ba