User:Allreet/About

About me
After successive careers in advertising, public relations, journalism and software documentation, I retired a few years ago to pursue the interests that for decades kept me up past two too many nights, yet weren't all that different from what I did during the day. Just more fun.

These interests include research and writing, which is what brought me to Wikipedia some 15 years ago. Music and radio would be two more, the first in relation to a Saturday program I host on our local public station and the second as an active member of the community group that started the station in 1995. Believing you only get out of things what you put into them, I've been a community volunteer since my early 20s, more recently as a board member for a small but iconic performing arts venue. Then there are the joys of living in a 200-year-old stone farmhouse now that I have the time for them.

I'm also the caretaker of Stella, our 13-pound cat, and Della, our 13-pound dog, though they would be the first to argue as to who's in charge.



Everything is all reet!
Borrowed from a 1941 Cab Calloway song, "all reet" is hip jive for "alright." The song's lyrics seem loony but these cats were cool. Dig? Well, all reet!

Cab's song, "Are You All Reet?", falls somewhere in the middle of my musical interests, which stretch from pre-1800 ballads and early 20th century train songs to Bob Dylan and the Beatles to the Americana genres I play on my radio show: folk, blues, folk rock, some rockabilly, "alt" and classic country, zydeco/cajun, R&B, et al.

These artists and songs also represent some of the musical subjects I write about for Wikipedia, though my interests here vary widely, basically whatever happens to catch my fancy.

My home page
The design for my Home page was adapted from the introductory page of Wikipedia:User Page Design Center, which has links to information and tools editors can use for designing pages. No credit was provided on who created the Design Center's page and other graphics I found, so I'll assume various editors were involved, most likely beginning with one very talented soul.

Many thanks to all!

How to get to Carnegie Hall
As they say, "practice, son, practice". So it is with writing for Wikipedia, except the mantra here is "sources, son, sources".

When I started as a Wikipedia editor, my initial interest was local history. Since I had been writing about the topic for decades, I knew how to get to the sources I needed. Though I did have a few books, the main sources available other than physical libraries were digital collections at major universities and the Internet Archive. Then I was drawn to a subject I had been interested in even longer, Bob Dylan. There I was fortunate to have a great team of editors to work with and learn from - and I do mean a great team, basically four other dedicated editors worldwide. Again I relied mostly on online sources and did fairly well. Numerous articles were available online through magazines and newspapers, and several websites were devoted to Dylan's recordings and concerts. For sure, the constant search for new sources taught me this: how to "mine" the internet.

At some point, though, I found serious limitations to this approach. If I wanted to write an entire article on a song, for example, source materials that specific were difficult if not impossible to come by. And on larger, more general topics, though I owned a couple biographies, I found it limiting to keep returning to the same sources over and over. So I began collecting books, one here and one there. While it never became an obsession, for sure it was an ongoing quest - and a very enjoyable one since visiting bookstores has always been one my greatest pleasures. Of course, books are expensive, less so now that I know how to buy them online, but discovering that came later rather than sooner. I'm happy about that because rummaging new and used bookstores, whether near home or during our travels, was such a joy. Now I have at least 35 books on Bob, plus several videos, and while I've been writing about him infrequently of late, I expect to return to the Dylan team soon.