Tom Brier plays my "Morgan Hill Rag"

Apart from when I first gave him this rag, Tom had been playing it as a fast and rousing piece, which was quite different to how I imagined it (but very enjoyable nonetheless). The night before this recording, as Chris Bradshaw organized a mass read-through of this rag at a party, she asked me at what tempo it should go. I pointed out that I wrote "Andantino" on the score, though lately Tom had been going quite a bit quicker than that.

After the read-through, Tom commented that he had forgotten how soulful the rag was at a slower tempo. So before he played it in this set the next day, he mentioned how he'd been playing it much faster than I had intended, and joked, "That's what you get when you put Italian as the tempo direction. I'm a valley guy; I don't know Italian!"

Thus, after this performance at a slower tempo, you see him look at me and ask, "How was that?" I thought I had put my hand high enough for my thumbs-up to be visible in the shot, but it wasn't.

I wrote this rag in 2007 without a title in mind. After several days, I finally remembered that the town I was living in at the time, Morgan Hill, California, had just celebrated its centenary. As this rag has a folksy, down-home feel to it, I thought naming it after a place was appropriate, so named it after the town of Morgan Hill, which is not named after a geographical feature; Morgan Hill was a man's name by whose ranch a train station had been built in the area officially known at the time as Rancho Ojo de Agua de la Coche, so people began calling it the "Morgan Hill station", and that name stuck when the area became a town.