Kenny Salwey's Swamp Stories CD

SWAMP STORIES Listen to Kenny Salwey tell stories from his life as the Last River Rat. Journey with him through the backwaters as he guides you along with his tales of the Mississippi River.   Limited copies! Call us with your order. 507-454-5949

Big River review of Kenny's Swamp Stories

Swamp Stories
By Kenny Salwey, Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colo., 2015. 70 min. 29 sec., CD. $16.00

Kenny Salwey is the Last River Rat, a title earned by a life immersed in the backwater wilderness of the Mississippi River and chronicled in his books and made internationally famous in the BBC documentary The Last River Rat.

For 25 years Kenny Salwey lived off the grid in a series of hand-built shacks in the middle of the 6,000-acre water world known as the Whitman Bottoms. He sustained this meager existence by hunting, trapping and guiding. An old Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources officer, who had several run-ins with Kenny on “a professional basis,” convinced him that he should share his experience and knowledge to help educate and encourage others to investigate the natural world that was Kenny’s home. The agent set up a series of speaking engagements at local schools, and the legend of the Last River Rat was born.

His real-life stories range from melancholy to adventurous to hilarious. Salwey’s weathered baritone and rocking chair cadence work together to paint a vivid picture of everything from a close call in the icy winter shelter of the Grandmother Tree to the wakeless glide of his canoe through a flooded forest with his trusty swamp dog at the helm.

The light, well placed instrumentation of Rick and Aric Sampson, Tom Pfaff, and Alexandria Sanders move these tales along like a cottonwood seed floating through the backwaters on a summer’s day.

If you can’t stand to take a break from fidgeting with an electronic device long enough to sit quietly and exercise your imagination for awhile, then this CD might not be for you.
On the other hand, it might be just what you need.