The Troubadour Gets Coffee House Fans Singing at Lunch with Books

Robert J. Gaudio had attendees singing and snapping fingers at Lunch with Books on Tuesday, August 2nd. The Troubadour set a scene that was reminiscent to the The Bitter End, Cafe Wha, or other club in the golden-age of folk music in New York's Greenwich Village.

Fans remembered the songs of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Peter, Paul & Mary, Kris Kristofferson, Joni Mitchell, John Prine, Carole King and more. The sing-along transported attendees back in time to a different era in music and their lives.

Robert J. Gaudio is a husband, the father of three children, a grandfather of four, an actor and director of local theater productions, and a criminal-defense attorney with the Ohio County Public Defender’s office. He has practiced law for over 25 years after working for various amounts of time as a steel-mill worker, a university professor, a fine-dining chef, and a restaurant manager. He's been playing instruments since he was 7 and has written music since the age of 17. Musical influences span over half a century –including the big bands, Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Ricky Skaggs, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Lady Gaga to name only a few. Bob has performed in coffee houses in the 1970s in Morgantown and learned to love the acoustic genre and the socially-aware tunes that arose from the early 1960s in Greenwich Village. He will render those kinds of songs and some others when he appears.

Aug. 9, 2022: Foote: A Mystery Novel with Tom Bredehoft

In the space of one weekend in Morgantown, West Virginia, private investigator Big Jim Foote finds himself at the center of two murder investigations. Suspected of one killing at a local festival, he locates the body of a missing person immediately after. The cops are watching him, and Big Jim has a secret he dares not reveal: he is a bigfoot living in plain sight, charged with keeping his people in the surrounding hills from being discovered. To protect the bigfoot secret, he must solve both murders—and convince himself it wasn’t a bigfoot who pulled the trigger. Through the course of his investigations, Big Jim is helped by unique and well-rendered characters and friends in both his bigfoot and human communities. Readers are introduced to Appalachian mountain folk and traditional culture in new ways, even while Big Jim experiences the impact of the opioid epidemic on his own bigfoot kin. By centering a mythical creature as the unlikely protagonist in this enchanting literary murder mystery, Foote offers a winsome redefinition of a cryptid “monster” and breathes new life into the PI genre.

Tom Bredehoft lives in Morgantown, West Virginia. In an earlier life, he was an English professor specializing in medieval literature.

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