I'm still looking through photos from Clifftop, the Appalachian String Band Festival. Natalie Garrett Wurtz snapped this lanyard with Live Music road sign – clever, but it's all dudes. She also caught this hula-hooping girl fiddler. Just to add a little more challenge to that fiery fiddling, try this! I would like to see the brain scan of someone who can walk and chew gum in this way.
Other sweet pictures here, by Mississippi fiddler Jack Magee, anticipate the future of bluegrass – there are lots of young girls involved. Someday they'll populate groups like the incredible Uncle Earl, one of my favorites.
I really love the photo of the dad and daughter tutorial. It reminds me that Katey Bellville, daughter of Rod, also grew up to be a musician, carrying forward that old timey tradition, and fusing it with contemporary sounds.
My friend Mary Helen, one of Sav's three extraordinary midwives, recently returned from Clifftop, West Virginia, where she and her friend Claudio, Harmony School teacher extraordinaire, attended the Appalachian String Band Festival. She posted some photos on facebook.
These pictures remind me of one of my first trips to Indiana, long before I came here to live, on an upcycled (read "rickety") school bus filled with musicians. We came down for Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Festival in Bean Blossom. Rod, John, and Sally Bellville, Mary DuShane, Cal Hand, Dakota Dave Hull, Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson were on the bus – I think I was the only non-musician. It was fun to be among that roving band of fiddlers and banjo pickers, who played music day and night, incessantly testing new and old-timey tunes. Bill Monroe appeared on the modest Bean Blossom stage dressed from head to toe in white, beneficent and magnificent among the mud-spattered folks (there were a few downpours) whose makeshift homesteads populated the campgrounds. At one point I needed to get away from the bee-buzzing constant sound of the music, so I took a walk in a field of daisies and Queen Anne's Lace, marveling at the natural beauty of Brown County, Indiana. Little did I know I would someday live just down the road in Bloomington.
Here are some pictures of Clifftop taken by Natalie Garrett Wurtz. The Jesus bumper sticker was a favorite at the festival ("most photographed") and I now have the William Holman Hunt images of Christ in my mind, trying to imagine if it really could be true that Jesus would be slap happy. (I have to doubt it.)
Richard's Roadkill Eatery: a joke perhaps, but also a testament to the uneasy transition from a culture that relied on food that was trapped or hunted, the old-fashioned way, and the situation today, when vehicles are a major weapon of animal destruction.
I never thought I'd blog, but here I am almost every day, with thoughts and observations sent out to friends, strangers, and far-flung family. This webspot is a bio-logue, a public idea and inspiration board. You can scroll the left side for a visual archive.
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