About Soulbutter & Hogwash:
Click to download a zip file of the complete album: 
In 2009, Gregory the Great Academy organized an effort to capture where the music of the school had ventured over the years and over the country for a cross section of alumni. These alumni had pursued the folk traditions they learned at the Academy in their own lives and in their own ways. In a project that spanned a whole year, different groups of alumni traveled to the Academy to make a recording that expressed a more developed, mature mode of folk song that grew out of the fresh youthful repertoire they learned as boys.
The collection intends to reflect a living tradition of folk music that animates the alumni community to this day, showing the growth of song and sensitivity in sound, theme, and spirit. The title “Soulbutter and Hogwash” was taken from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck, the ever-wise boy, speaks about the charms of music as a balm to the balderdash of the world: “Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.” This honest and bully album bears prominence as a project largely organized by alumnus Andrew Baird, who fell asleep in the Lord in 2019 and whose family tartan graces the scarf given to members of the St. Nicholas Guild. May his memory be eternal.
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