HAPPY MUSIC RAMBLE

arturo herrera



I been through it and come out the other end.
                                       ---Wiley Maxwell, Jr

Much of today was spent with Cleve Andrews playing fiddle and Jr Maxwell pickin banjo in silence. Painting a likeness of these musicians from a photo taken about 1960 in the living room of Jr's house that burned to the ground in the early 80s, maybe 1981. On the radio just now I heard Tom T Hall singing I'm A Coal Mining Man. Hall lives over near Bristol and participates in the music of the region. The song sounds like it was written by and sung by an aging coal miner. That was WBRF. I thought I'd put the radio on some classical music. Big orchestra sound. It didn't feel right. Clicked 3 on the preset and some bluegrass guitar was doin it to it. That was it. Banjo and fiddle came in, vocals and I was on the right station. Next came, I'm a coal minin man / four miles underground. Hall also wrote Big Country Bluegrass's recent number one hit The Men In Hats And Ties.



It must be from visualizing fiddle and banjo music over the last 3 days that bluegrass is my musical satisfaction this evening. Sounds like the Delmore Brothers singing I Want To Sing That Rock and Roll. Sounding so much like the Everly Brothers, I'm a little bit overwhelmed that the Everly Brothers were so in the tradition. Then the dj, Jay Allen, said it was Gillian Welch. Whoa. She's changed. Or my memory was a false memory. Possible. That song was impressive. It's on YouTube if you want to hear it. I don't usually listen to bluegrass while writing you, because it distracts me completely, makes me stop and listen. A vocal, a banjo, a fiddle, a mandolin, a resonator guitar, a guitar, a lyric might catch my attention and I'm gone. So many possibilities that distraction is a certainty. Like just now is a fiddle, banjo, guitar and bass playing Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss, layin it to it. All the musicians are among the best. The Mount Rogers Ramblers. They have one video at YouTube, listed as Soldier's Joy. They actually play two tunes, Sally Ann, then Soldier's Joy. It's a good example of their sound. Good fiddler. Happy music.



I just now said to myself, muttering, not quite out loud, "Isn't it weird being a human being on earth." It just now occurred to me that I say this to myself quite a lot. I say it while driving, or anything. It comes forward when I'm thinking about something especially wonderful I'd have missed living on another planet. Like the Mount Rogers Ramblers. Sometimes it can be over something truly absurd like post-Reagan America. Hearing news about people in a place and time acting out the worst humanity has to offer. At the same time, the best in us is acted out every day. On the front page of the paper, if it bleeds it leads, a Canadian woman killed on her motorcycle in Sparta. Later, a letter to the editor, an open letter to the people of Sparta from her man, telling of new friends, bonding with the community for all the help received. He said he will return to visit new friends here. What's weird about being a human being on earth is the variety of possible responses or reactions that would vary from one individual to the next. That's a lot of possibles. His letter came from the heart of the one chosen by the white marble of fate.



All varieties of human nature, each one so incredibly unique that we're known by the people knowing us by our personalities, that endless checklist of characteristics, easy to get along with or overbearing, characteristics that are put together like in an astrology chart, and add up to who we are individually. In my way of seeing, just that is one of the weirdest aspects of being human on earth in any time over the last 50,000 or more years. The time we're in now will be told in history books two thousand years from now in the way Romans are seen now, Xtreme hedonism. Til the end of time this time we're in today, the Age of Oil, will be told as the worst time of all to be living on earth, the time when all those beasts of the Revelation roam in the saga of the evening news, and we live our lives subject to all of them. The darkness is so dark now, I can only hope it's the dark before dawn. It has to be. If it gets any darker, we're in for it. It feels like it won't be much longer we'll have to wait.



It's also the time of the return of the Avatar. Jesus was fond of prostitutes and thieves. He didn't say, I love you, but I don't love what you do. No qualifications. Jesus came in a time of Xtreme hedonism. Maybe he'll come again in another such time. I refuse to anticipate or expect any interpretation of how the Return will manifest. I figure we'll know it when it happens. That's all that matters. Or not. I've an idea it has something to do with a collective raising of consciousness, after which we will be very different from the people that went into it. We already are and evidently have a ways yet to go. I can't help but think that living one's life by spiritual principles helps, such as paying attention to what we're doing, keeping the attention focused on now, the moment, the place, the people, the absence of people. Keep my attention closer to home and let Washington DC, Tehran, Pakistan, Baghdad, London and New York take care of themselves. If they don't, that's too bad. I can't help any of them. They wouldn't listen if I tried.



I can stay at home and paint pictures, hold Caterpillar, watch movies, have coffee at Selma's, love God and keep my attention on where I am. As long as I have peace in my heart, where I am will be in peace. That's the closest I can get to the meaning with words. It is that simple and it is not that simple. It is what it is. When I can get there (here), full acceptance without judgment, who needs to worry about 35 people killed by a suicide bomber in Kandahar? All the karma involved is someplace else on the globe, a long ways off. The only karma of my concern is where I am. I'll be happy to reach that place where my focus is on here and now. It takes a real stillness, an inner stillness that wouldn't ring the first note on a wind chime.



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GALAX ON FM RADIO

galax


Listening to Galax Fiddler's Convention, Saturday night bluegrass. Three hours I've been listening. Don't want to turn it off. For several years I've been disappointed by the bluegrass bands playing at Galax. This time is different. Don't know if it's me or Galax. More inclined to think it's me. People I've talked with who pay closer attention to Galax Fiddler's Convention than I do have told me Galax has spells of really good bluegrass and really average bluegrass, same with old-time. If bluegrass has been taking a rest at Galax, it's on its feet now. Almost makes me wish I'd gone. But not quite. I'd rather hear it on the radio than drive to Galax, find a place to park for $10, walk a long ways, buy a ticket, enter the melee of thousands going in all directions at once. Find a place sit, sit there several hours wishing I'd stayed home and listened to the radio, thinking about $15 for gas, the same to get in, $40 total to wish I'd stayed home. The picture above tells why I stayed home.



I like a fiddler's convention, but I'd still rather listen at home. I like having cds of the music and hearing it on the radio. I like a live show too, but like home better. They are great experiences for musicians, for social people who like to be out seeing people they know, being in a scene, or whatever. A lot of people like to loiter in the parking lot listening to different mixes of musicians picking at the open trunklid of somebody's car where they keep the fruitjar. That was the old days. My personal preference is to sit and listen to what's happening on the stage, get a few photographs. I'd rather go to a small musical venue and hear a good show at the Front Porch Gallery at Woodlawn. I'd rather hear Willard, Scott and Edwin make music than just about anybody. I also don't have $40 pocketchange to let go of. That's a lot of coffee at Selma's and not quite a tank of gas.



Hearing some mighty fine fiddle, banjo and mandolin tearing up some song. Every band has a good banjo and fiddle. Heard a song earlier we know around here as Bear Tracks. They introduced it with another name, Slewfoot. A band from I think Connecticut played it. Whoever sang it did a good job of it. Somebody now is singing Our Little Cabin Home On The Hill in a Mac Wiseman style. Good band. I believe I heard them earlier. The MC tells who it is before they start, and don't tell when they're over, only their number. It's over. Didn't even tell number. Went straight into commercial. Turned it off. Don't want to hear commercials, esp country music radio commercials. They're awfully loud and aggressively demand attention. It's not music to my ears. I don't want a new truck. A band from Hillsville playing Big Spike Hammer, a song I've thought was called Della Mae. They're doing it right. Very well done mountain bluegrass. A promise of old-time coming up after a couple more bluegrass songs. Turned it off for a bit. A spell of silence.



On Buffalo Death Rattle's facebook page today appeared a link by someone the band met at Clifftop, Sean Johnson, to a YouTube video titled CLIFFTOP MOMENTS 2011. The video is by someone who goes by tackyjulie. It is a collection of videos tackyjulie made at the fiddler's convention, backstage, out among the tents, bunches of people jamming. There were 14 episodes of different jams. Buffalo Death Rattle was the 5th episode doing what they do best, tearing up whatever tune they're playing at the moment. They sounded good. Their segment opened with a dancer. Everything on that video was nice. Evidently the band was well received at Clifftop. Turned the radio back on. An old-time tune was getting ready to play and the feller doing the vocal said into the mic, "If y'aint right, get right." Whatever. It's Larry The Cable Guy deep, might mean fire up a bowl to anybody under 65. It could mean get right with Jesus. Probably he thought it was something wonderfully ambiguous to say. Like Bob Dylan said to an interviewer when asked what a particular song meant, It's mine to write them, yours to decide what they mean. The old-time part is where the music's at for me.



Oh boy! Roan Mountain Hilltoppers next, playing Train 45. This is a band with drive aplenty. They are gettin er done. They gave it their own sound. It was good to hear. Next Acoustic Heritage from Konnarock, which would be Debbie Grim Yates playing fiddle and vocals on Shortnin Bread. Every time I hear old-time music I'm grateful to God for the opportunity to have this music in my heart.



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WAITING FOR SUPERMAN THE MOVIE

superman in black and white

The day's documentary was Waiting For Superman, an in depth look at the American school system, examining why our schools haven't done so well over the last 30 or so years. The focus was on the worst schools in the land, looking at what wasn't working, why the kids tended to leave school in large percentages. The primary concern seemed to be searching for solutions to questions of how to make the schools function to better serve the kids. The issue is that the kids are the future. American hi-tech businesses have to recruit people from India for jobs American kids aren't educated for. The film followed some people with ideas, who are putting their thoughts to action and making a very real difference.

Over and over it was found that the problem is not the kids. It's the adults. That's all adults concerned. Teachers, staff, principal, parents, school board, unions. In the places where these different people we might call educators, because that's what their lives are about, put their ideas into action, it's a matter of changing adult behavior, not so much kids. All the various ones who wanted to improve the schools came up against administrative resistance in a major way, like unions. By the time they were able to get certain schools in shape academically, they had found the reason I chose not to go into teaching. The concern was taking care of the adults, not taking care of the kids. I went on to higher education with intentions to become a teacher. But by the time I got my degree, I didn't want any more of school, either side of the desk. I lost confidence in the American schooling system. My conclusion was that it was not education. If I had chosen to go against that learning, my concern would have been for the kids first The adults would have me out of there by end of first year, any way I could be got rid of.

I watched the movie remembering my own schooling. K-6 I preferred school to home. 7-12 was factory school I was never able to adapt to. I didn't have Pink Floyd's The Wall in that time, but I saw factory school similarly to Roger Waters' vision. Just another brick in the wall. Then march in step military and patriotism brain washing. It didn't take so well on me, because military mind was my enemy. I made a weak attempt at a big university factory school. Hated it. After military duty served, I went to College of Charleston when it started a year with a population of 500 and ended the year with 400. Classes seldom had more than 15 in them. All tests were questions to be answered by essay. The school had an honor code from the time of the Old South. Seen cheating, you're out. If you see someone cheating and don't report it, you're out. 100% strict. I liked that. I wasn't inclined to cheat anyway, but could easily be influenced by people around me at that time in the life. The absolute rule kept me honest. It also made me honest through the rest of my life. Four years of meditating on the value of honesty, I got it. 

I don't believe the reference in the title to Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot was accidental. Waiting for Godot is a play of two men waiting for Godot throughout the passage of their time on the stage. They wait, they talk, they anticipate. Godot never arrives. I took the reference to Godot to mean the people who made the film saw situation after situation where some people attempting to make a difference were frustrated, because the problem was bigger than what one teacher can handle. Early on, it was explained the title, Waiting For Superman, came from childhood reading Superman comics. Superman saved the day at the last minute in story after story. Superman never arrives. The documentary follows a handful of creative-minded educators around the country who are doing some serious work toward solving the school problem. Not one of them is a Superman. But if their kind of thinking spreads, we won't need a Superman appearance.  

I couldn't help but admire all the people we watch performing their work that is driven by believing they are doing fulfilling work that benefits many. If the kids are given a real education, hope, reason to improve themselves, they tend not to drop out and be dead before they're 18. It is a major social problem these people are curing at the same time they are finding ways to educate kids in a time when American public education has failed a rather large social class that grows up without hope and ends up in prison if not dead. Cleverly, the director, Davis Guggenheim, included a chart comparing the expense of keeping a prisoner for four years and putting someone all the way through school including college. Keeping someone in a prison is expensive. Helping someone all the way through school is more economical for the State than keeping them behind bars.

Prisons are full of anger, dark energy that makes the convict unfit for the world outside. Good education makes at least a better life than that. Like one of the little girls said, She likes having the choices education offers. Like the people waiting for Superman, I can't help but be convinced that as long as we're going to keep civilization going, when doing it well is an option, why not go for doing it well? Solve the education problem and a great big 'nother problem will be solved right along with it. And probably a few more too. So many of our social problems are interwoven, it appears impossible to untangle them. This film tells me there are people busy searching for meaningful answers in a time they are needed. Even if they don't make a big difference, a small difference will do.

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BACK HOME RAMBLE

accidental snapshot



I'm feeling back at home on the mountain. Spent much of the day sleeping. Needed it. Justin came by to put out corn and apples for deer in the woods across the road. I went with him and he checked his two wildlife digital cameras to see what had been there. No bears this time, just deer. Those outdoor cameras strapped to a tree get some good pictures of whatever animals are nibbling the corn and apples. Going out there in the woods I know as home, helping carry buckets of apples, fussing over the cameras, looking at what has been through there in the last day and night, talking with Justin, I felt like I was back home after being away for about a week. Having my city friends here took me there. Every year I drift farther away from city thinking, until by now my city friends are from an altogether different culture. I still have that culture in me, but it's more in the background in this time in my life after 35 years of living in the country.



Inside myself, I've tapped into that culture I came from (Flatland culture) for several days, without objection---these are my friends. I tell them a little about the cultural differences to help them understand why certain things they take for granted don't compute with me. They are comfortable with airports. I've not been in an airport in so long, and everything about airports has changed since then, it's a foreign world for me, especially being an American and seeing cops everyplace like in a 3rd world country in a dictatorship. Everybody is in agreement it's necessary, except me. I have to give it to them, it probably is necessary. Considering how complex a society we've had since we've become international, it's like Yeats said in his poem The Second Coming, "the center doesn't hold." The trend in music over the last 40 or more years has been fusion everywhere in the world, mixing every kind of thing together. Like Abigail Washburn playing Chinese music with an old-time banjo so it sounds like American old-time and Chinese both.



I'd hate to spend money on a ticket, then at the airport find out I'm on the no fly list like Senator Ted Kennedy and a lot of other people not republicans. It's difficult for me to live in a period of time under the American right wing taking power to themselves like in the 3rd World. We've been 30 years with the right controlling Washington DC power. Years ago I heard someone say American political influence swings on a pendulum that spans 40 years. The Roosevelt influence from around 1940 lasted until 1980 when the Reagan political machine systematically started weeding out social programs that helped the American people who needed help. Since 1980 all legislation has turned against the people to corporate money. Looks like 10 more years of the right wing in power. I don't know if the Constitution or Democracy can handle 10 more years of republican dismantling.



I heard talk on an NPR talk show about London preparing their advertising for the 2012 Olympics that apparently will be in or near London. They had planned to use the Clash's song London's Burning, one of the most popular rock songs of the punk era in London. Seems odd, because it's such a rebel song. Now on the news every time I listen, I hear about London and cities in northern England burning. First thing I thought upon hearing that news was this sort of thing can spread really fast. I've wondered how urban rebellion can work considering the sophisticated surveillance that spots any political gathering of people that could threaten government. Spontaneous flare-ups of rebellion-minded people scattered everywhere, people who are left out and boiling inside. When something takes off in one part of a city, copy-cat fires get started in another part of the city, and it can go on and on. If it catches on like kids killing kids in school did for several years, it could force full-fledged popular police state. Insurance corporations don't like destruction of property.



It's good to be back at home in my mind. For reasons I never thought about, I slept through most of the day and got up around 6. Sleeping on and off, an hour or two at a time. Wake up and turn over to go back to sleep. Been on the go for a week. In town several hours yesterday. Talked a couple hours with fiddler Gary Joines. I'd had a few 8x10 copies made of a business card size b&w photo made in what seems like it might be the late 50s, around 1960, of Cleve Andrews playing fiddle and Jr Maxwell playing banjo. I took him one of the prints and we talked about Cleve and the music without pause. Busy I've been, but it has all been to my liking. Sitting with the old boy on Tuesday mornings as a hospice volunteer, socializing at Selma's coffee shop afterward, which is always enjoyable, grocery store, drug store, gas station, money flying out of my hands, keeping it in motion.



Shirdi Sai Baba, master in India in the time of the early 20th Century recommended to his followers to let money flow through their fingers. I took that for sound counsel. I did that anyway, never made enough to do any better than get by, so all my money coming in flows back out into the economy stream. I have thought at length what he might have meant by that. He's saying don't get attached to it thinking you've got something of value. His teaching was that the spirit is the only value. Attachments are like tethers that hold a hot-air balloon in place on the ground, keep it from soaring free fulfilling its purpose. I'm glad to be able to say in this time of the life that I value Caterpillar the highest of anything I call mine, like books, cds, paintings, car. If the house were to catch on fire, I'd pick up Caterpillar before going out the door. The house isn't going to catch on fire and I don't need what I value tested, because I have a pretty fair understanding of what I value, the reason I value. And my friends. I value my friends like I value Caterpillar with what I think the Chinese call filial love.



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