Americana

When you peek into letters 200 to 400 years old, instead of the guilty pleasure of reading somebody else's mail, you feel good about connecting to living history. That dancing "N" signature at the end of the letter seeking supplies for officers encamped at Valley Forge in 1778 belongs to Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, George Washington's quartermaster. George Washington signed "GWashington" to a bill of lading for 10 barrels of shad and 40 of herring at Mount Vernon on May 29, 1788, connecting the G and W with a flourish and crossing his t with a trademark curlicue.

Michael Buble / Wolf Trap Singer Michael Buble updates the sound of swing on his latest album, It's Time. He performs cuts from it at Wolf Trap, 1635 Trap Road in Vienna, Va., Sunday night at 8:30. Tickets are $22-$38. For more information, call 410-481-6500 or visit wwww.wolftrap.org. The Damnwells / Rams Head Tavern The Damnwells bring a blend of Americana and pop-rock to Rams Head Tavern, 33 West St. in Annapolis, Friday night at 8:30. Tickets are $15. For more information, call 410-268-4545 or visit www.ramsheadtavern.

What happens when two major-league musical legends decide to team up for a tour of minor-league ballparks? Sports and music fans got a good, if rain-soaked, idea Thursday night as two prolific singer-songwriters, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, took to a makeshift stage in centerfield at Aberdeen's Ripken Stadium for a four-hour concert that was equal parts Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams and Hank Aaron. The sixth stop on the duo's current 22-city tour - the seventh show is at Arthur W. Perdue Stadium in Salisbury tonight - brought together fans in ballcaps and bandannas, Birkenstocks and Orioles ponchos.

Frank and Debbie Bukszar's two-story Colonial is a tribute to Americana and country collectibles. Located in southwestern Baltimore County, their Highfields neighborhood was developed by Ryland Homes in the mid-1980s. While many houses are standouts in Early American design with manicured lawns, blooming fruit trees and large front porches with white wooden rails, the Bukszars' decorating touch is immediately noticeable from the street. And it carries over to every square inch of the home.

At the start of The Legacies of Western Maryland College, by K. Douglas Beakes (Gateway, 183 pages, $5), is a photo of the author. How proudly he smiles, this being his third book so far about alma mater? Not on your tintype. He glowers. Beakes, a small-town boy, entered Western Maryland College in 1942, went off to war, and graduated in 1948. Today, his mind is a movie screen for rerun after rerun of student days and nights. But, since last May 20's name change ("a modern-day academic tragedy")

During Hollywood's Golden Age in the late 1930s, three movie houses stood on Westminster's Main Street -- the newest and grandest of them the art deco Carroll Theatre. For the next four decades, the cinemas drew townspeople and farmers -- even members of the Baltimore Colts football team when they were at training camp at Western Maryland College -- out on the town Friday and Saturday nights to see the blockbusters of the day: Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, The Ten Commandments, 101 Dalmatians, and Star Wars.

SPRING VALLEY, Nev. - The serenity of the snowy valley is broken by the distant flutter of an approaching helicopter. Flying 15 feet above the pinyon, juniper and sage, it weaves and bobs, herding a dozen wild horses toward a holding pen. The pilot wrangles the mustangs, snorting and whinnying, toward capture. Their coats gleam with sweat; plumes of steam flow from their nostrils. As the horses approach the pen, partially hidden behind a rocky knoll, a cowboy on a nearby hillside swats his Judas horse into action.

It's all up for grabs. You name an event, a moment in time, a shared national experience, and sooner or later it seems it will be transformed into something called "Americana." A thing with a price, an item for sale - "merch." In academia they call this process "commodification." Elsewhere they might say "packaging." The profane, the profound, whatever - it's all been tossed into the same box by MastroNet Inc., an Oak Brook, Ill., company that until now had specialized in sports memorabilia.

When flooding from Hurricane Agnes tore through Ellicott City nearly 30 years ago, it threatened the nation's oldest railroad station, wiped out tracks and damaged its structures off Main Street. After the station survived the high waters, a group of concerned citizens decided it was time to restore the nonfunctioning station and turn it into a museum. Now Ellicott City B&O Railroad Station Museum is celebrating its 25th year of educating the public about the rich history of the station and railroad.

WASHINGTON -- OK, this is what you do Monday night. Begin watching the first episode -- the first of 10 episodes -- of the public television series "Jazz." At the 40-minute mark, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis explains "the Big Four" -- the technique of accenting the second fourth beat of a march. Marsalis -- a son of New Orleans, where jazz was born, midwived by brass instruments left over from the Civil War -- picks up his trumpet and plays a bit of "The Stars and Stripes Forever," first as John Philip Sousa wrote it, then with the jazz syncopation of the Big Four.