Peter Stampfel and daughter Zoe.

There are always waves of popular music, but discovery is found in the undertow.
That's where Peter Stampfel exists with unbridled integrity, joy and adventure.

Stampfel, 71, is founder of the Holy Modal Rounders (that featured playwright/roadie Sam Shepard on drums) and original member of the weird New York-based street band the Fugs. Yo La Tengo and Bob Dylan are fans.
He won a Grammy for his 1997 liner notes to "The Anthology of American Folk Music." And his wife Betsy's father Donald Wollheim was the first person to publish William Burroughs. Wollheim was a 1930s pulp publisher at Ace Books who edited science fiction and "sweet romance," which is what women's literature was called back then. Stampfel still works full time as a book editor with DAW Books, his wife's New York-based publishing company.

Stampfel makes his first full-tilt Chicago club appearance in 16 years at 8:30 p.m. Saturday at the Hideout. He'll be playing wonderfully innocent music from the just-released "Dook of the Beatniks" that was recorded in 1999 at the Boiler Room in New Orleans......

MORGAN CITY, La.--

The first time I came through Morgan City was in the rainy spring of '91 on a pontoon trip from Chicago to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival with my friend Bill FitzGerald and a few other really hearty boaters.
It was my first exposure to the warmth of river people. At almost every levee south of Memphis we encountered a local in a pick up truck with a hunting dog who was willing to take us into town for gas or tell us about a forbidden restaurant.

It was also the first time I heard about the Louisiana Shrimp & Petroleum Festival, held every Labor Day weekend along the banks of the Atchafalaya River (Atchafalaya is Indian for "long river") in Morgan City. The river is a living, breathing delta and the main distributary of the Mississippi River. The Atachafalya Basin is the largest river swamp in North America (173,00 acres of cypress swamps and 64,000 acres of aquatic habitat).

So I put the Louisiana Shrimp & Petroleum Festival on my bucket list. I finally made it.....