Went out to see a local blues band called "AAA" or "Triple A" play at Zeno's with Fred & some of his friends. The band was pretty good, and I wasted some dosh on a few pints. They have lambic on tap at Zeno's, which is great & all, but good lord is it expensive. The Woodchuck is almost reasonable, though. I was commenting that the lead singer/guitarist of the band sounded kind of like Randy Newman, and then another singer came up to the microphone and launched into Louisiana 1927, which made me laugh. Believe it or not, but it was the first time I had heard it actually played, and not just quoted as lyrics in a blog or livejournal for political points.

I ended up being a Civil War bore at the table, talking about Harsh & the Maryland campaign with a friend of Fred's, a fiddler & science teacher named Andy. We got on the subject because I had a library copy of Griffith's Battle Tactics, and I started in on the whole Jamieson/McWhiney-Griffith-Nosworthy thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic. After having finished Griffith over the weekend, I've come to the conclusion that I was being too harsh on him, mostly due to my having encountered all of his ideas in one form or another in Nosworthy, in the wrong chronological order, as it were. I imagine I'll be equally, and equally unfairly, hard on Freeman when I get around to reading more than a few pages here & there of his Lee biography or Lee's Lieutenants, having read Nolan & Connelly & Wert taking apart poor Freeman in books printed in the last thirty years, with all the advantages of hindsight & new research.