Here's a thing - on Thursday 28th April I was at Merlefest in North Carolina, with my 2 pals (all 3 of us brought up in Belfast) watching opening night headliners The Zac Brown Band. Currently very big in the States, they were terrific, as good a live performance as I've seen for a long time. Towards the end of a 2 hour set Zac introduces a song he's written about an experience watching the sun rise on a mountain top in Australia. There follows a song incorporating a bit of an Aboriginal stylee chant. The big screen camera then focuses on Zac playing his nylon strung guitar as he sings "We were borne before the wind, all so younger than the sun..." and there is a collective sigh as people recognised Van Morrison's Into the Mystic

Fast forward 11 days to last night where I'm at Bury Met with the GLW to see Mary Gauthier. On comes opener Ben Glover who turns out to be a Northern Irishman now living in Nashville and writing with Mary G amongst others. He was pretty good, with nice guitar style, often using non-standard tunings. On his last number he had reverted to standard tuning and in the middle he stopped singing, kept strumming and said "Any Van Morrison fans in the house?" A mild ripple from the audience. "This one's for the 11 of youse"

I don't know how this happened; I must have just sensed it from the rhythm and the strum pattern but I nudged the lovely Mrs Black
and whispered "he's going to do Into the Mystic", and he promptly did

What's that all about?