THERE IS NO DEATH

roller rover, by william wegman, 1986

Over the last year I've been watching a baby come into awareness, a day at a time, everything new, drawn to the familiar, mystified by everything, curious, uncertain about everything, directed through the day by diaper changes, getting picked up, fed, put to sleep, played with. At Vada's birthday party, it was a time when she was discovering standing on her feet. She wanted to stand on her feet like everybody else. With 20 or so adults there, every time she managed to get on her feet, somebody would pick her up afraid she'd fall. The look on her face every time she was picked up was a kind of frantic PUT ME DOWN, she was standing up. All day long she spent her time by herself climbing a chair leg to stand up, then somebody picked her up. I'm so fascinated by her, I sit and watch every move she makes, enchanted to see somebody coming into a body with no mind, seeing the mind develop through experience. Yesterday I noticed that she is privately interested in the sky. She was sitting on the deck playing, rolling a ball, and every once in awhile she'd take a break and look at the sky like she's trying to figure out what it is. It's blue sometimes, white sometimes, gray sometimes, bright, dark, different about every time she sees it.


Three years ago I was taking care of a friend and watched dementia come in and take over, saw mind gradually slip away. Finally, in one week I saw his mind go away like a bathtub that takes a week to drain. It just went away. At the end of that week he had no mind. One day, a couple weeks into the state of no mind, he said, "I've got to go to the doctor!" I asked what was the problem. "Something's wrong with my mind!" At the end of the sentence, he forgot it. At the same time that I hated to see my friend fade away without mind, and return to the state of a baby needing diaper changes, needing every kind of care from feeding to cleaning and watching closely, because he'd lost his defenses with his mind. He had become dependent as a baby. Nothing was familiar anymore. All was new. One time he fell out of the bed. He said he had parked his car on the roof, stepped out of the car and fell through the roof. He was worried about the car on the roof, that it might fall through. No, your car is in its parking space where it belongs. That was the end of it. For him, the car on the roof was as real as the car in the parking space was for me.


Almost 3 years after losing him, Jr remains most affectionately in my mind during his last months as mind and self-sufficiency were slipping away. Though his mind was gone, I could still communicate with him. I knew the soul was there, the subconscious was there. I came to see the subconscious as something like a basketball, for a model. Around the surface of the basketball electrical chargers dance everywhere. The electrical charges are mind. When the dance of mind is done, the subconscious is still there, the soul is still there. Only surface mind is missing. I saw that most clearly one day when he was down to just a few days to go, 3 of his friends had stopped by to visit at the same time. We were all in the bedroom looking at him in the bed, just barely awake. He didn't recognize any of them. I started telling them about how he was doing and he spoke up with rational mind. He'd been hearing what I'd said and corrected me. That hit me powerfully. I never talked about him in front of him again. I realized he is aware on some level. Though I couldn't see the awareness, I knew it was there and honored it as if I were seeing it.


It's the same with baby Vada. I believe she understands what is being said to her. Her mother and daddy believe she does too, from their experience. I've found that my cats and dogs understood what I was saying when I spoke to them in sentences and paragraphs. They knew exactly what I was saying. I know because their behavior afterward indicated clear understanding. Vada's behavior after being told something in sentences suggests she understood. Pre-language, I've an idea babies and our pets read us telepathically, to whatever degree I can't guess. Probably a different degree per individual. In the baby is a subconscious, the basketball; and the soul, possibly the air in the basketball. The soul carries experience from the previous lifetime and the other lifetimes past, it carries experience from one individual to the next. It can just about be assumed that some of the inexplicable things we know have come from a previous lifetime. It's from the zone where everything is seamless and can't be categorized, elusive to put a finger on, like mercury. Like if somebody in this lifetime is afraid of driving a car and refuses to learn to drive, it leads me to suspect that individual may have died last time in a car he was driving that wrecked. That's not a certainty, but a suggestion. It has happened to a lot of people all the way around the globe.


My friend Sandy Hayes, who lives at Boone, had a pain in the left side of her upper back all her life. Not a sharp pain, but it was always there, for no apparent reason. In a past-life regression she found that she had been at the Sandy Ridge massacre conducted by General Custer, a Cheyenne (if my feeble memory serves well enough) woman, running from the mayhem, carrying her baby, was shot from behind in that spot of her back, and died. She found the connection in her name too. That moment of being killed trying to save her baby was evidently very powerful for her, she still carried it. I've learned how important it is to a given lifetime how we leave the body, from a little bit of experience in that seamless place where it's difficult to interpret, and from reading about it. In Jr's time of leaving the body I was aware of the importance of how one leaves the body. I wanted Jr's soul memory to carry a peaceful, quiet passage in his own home, in his own bed with no worries.


It was important to me to be able to give him that. I was communicating with his soul in the later weeks, like a mother communicates with a baby's soul in the early weeks. My own reason for not wanting him in a nursing home, was that I wanted him taken care of by somebody who understood him and cared. It was important to me that I regard him and everything I do with complete integrity of spirit, because he was still there, despite no mind. The hospice nurses complimented me over and over on the quality of my care. It was because the man I respected to the sky was still there, completely there, just missing those little electrical charges we call mind, and I was there to help him in his time of leaving the body to have it as comfortably as possible, taken care of by someone who cares. Same as coming in, we need to have someone who cares. I believe going out requires caring too, for it to be best. I could not tolerate leaving him to poorly paid people who work in shifts. There, he was the same as a small load of lumber. I thought of nursing homes the lumberyard for the dying. I could not allow Jr to be regarded indifferently in his important time.


My feeling around baby Vada is that I want her passage into this lifetime comfortable and happy, laughing instead of crying. I am aware she is bringing with her several lifetimes of experience. It's a strong suspicion I have that Vada was born a happy baby, because she found the two souls her soul already loves to the max. When I'm with the three of them, it feels to me that they have all three found each other, and they're all happy. I'm glad for Vada that her entry into this lifetime is a happy one with people who care as deeply for her as she cares for them. That's what we want for all babies, though some don't get it. I'd love to watch her grow up, but am satisfied to see she is in loving hands that will always take good care of her. It has been and still is a learning for me that I can't help but see having divine guidance. First, I watch someone I care about fade away mentally and die. Second, I see someone born (not literally) and watch this new person develop mind from that seamless no place into differentiation of shapes, objects, words. I see her gaze around at all these strange colors and shapes and movements in curiosity. I've noticed her recently looking at the sky trying to figure out what it is, often. I've seen fade-out and fade-in. Death, where is thy sting? appears right now to be a facet of my learning from the experience. Go to sleep there, wake up here. There is no death.


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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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BUFFALO DEATH RATTLE ON THE ROAD

dusty, lyle, josh

ashley

john

dusty and lyle

The old white utility van with 250 thousand miles on it putt-putted the Buffalo Death Rattle band up the road toward the highway to wherever they're headed. I was able to see them for a few minutes as they were packing the pod for the road. First thing I noticed, Ashley was more beautiful today than yesterday. I've come to see that her feminine is the total of who she is, not just her looks, not makeup and heels, nor generally the expected. I came away from this experience with a very real respect for her as a human being, as a woman, as herself. I can say the same of the others, them being people who, individually, expanded as I came to know them a little bit better, talking, such as, "Where you from?" John came from a small community of a town in NW Maine, rural and remote, the Appalachian mountains where they leave the country at the northernmost extremity of the east coast. He has a stillness about him of people familiar with very long winters, cutting lots of firewood. And he evidently spent some of those winters perfecting his guitar picking. He plays a Martin and deserves it. 

Their destination is northward toward Clifftop fiddlers convention in West Virginia. They've never been to anything like that. They were apprehensive, anxious, concerned that nobody might connect with their music, them being new together and relatively new on their instruments, having no idea what to expect there. Their first night of the jam on the porch knocked my sox off. I've said before, I expected pretty good, but not what I heard. What I heard was a group of people from random dots on the map of the eastern US. They'd found their way to post-Katrina New Orleans, each in his/her own way, and for their own reasons or motivations. Each with an interest in old-time music and making their own music in the old-time way. They learned from cds, now mp3s, from hearing old-time bands and fiddlers, Ed Haley, Emmett Lundy. When I mentioned Eddie Bond as a fiddler from this area, Lyle and Dusty lit up. Cds and YouTube. Dusty especially has seen quite a lot of old-time bands from around here. They were familiar with a lot of names. 

It tickled me to hear these young twenty-somethings who went through the waist of the hour glass in New Orleans and came out a band, talking about the musicians of our region of the mountains as the legends that they are. I just don't hear it from the outside much. It's understood around here that it don't get much better'n Kyle Creed on a banjer and a fiddle, or Benton Flippen on a banjer and a fiddle, too. And the list goes on. The people in the band knew of Galax as legend. I was loving it, hearing the people I live among appreciated afar as they're appreciated at home in their own communities. I was hearing these musicians whose ears directed them to old-time, they each one figured it out on their own, got together and are now figuring it out as a band, together. It's a communal teaching and learning, practicing and performing together. They have a firm command of the music, and they play it like people born in these mountains play it. This is what motivates my awe in response to what I hear of their musicianship.

Tuesday night they jammed for a couple hours as I sat in the ring of the semi-circle getting pictures. I like to wait awhile after a band starts to get the feel for their sound, their rhythms, their physical gestures, their eyes, their expressions. In a sense, to get the feel for their flow. When I start seeing images I want to catch, I take the camera out of the case, crank it up and frame a certain composition and click. I had fun with the sun setting in the background, putting fiddle, bass and accordion with strong back light. I'd focus the camera lower out of the light to get the aperture I wanted on this fantastic automatic camera, pushing the button half way and holding it, then frame it like I want it and click. It white outs the sky and puts a nice white line around the edge of the person. I sat in one spot taking the pictures to avoid being a distraction. I figure a good picture can be found from any perspective. If not, oh well. I'm happy with the perspective of sitting on the deck looking up at them. I felt like it was an appropriate perspective as I looked up to them in respect, every one of them individually.

Yesterday I heard them practicing the same tune for several hours. A couple of them working on noting and timing, like Dusty's banjo and Lyle's fiddle finding the groove together on the deck. Ashley running through parts of it on her accordion in the shade of the white pine. John sitting on a turned-up milk crate they use for carrying things in the van, and for sitting on outside the van, practicing his fiddle playing.  Multi-use furniture. Same tune all the way along, parts of it going here, parts of it going there. The music became three-dimensional in space. It was a more relaxed version of what I'd heard the evening before when they were jamming, though this time pieces in the air from three directions in no relation to each other except the same tune. It was beautiful. I was thinking of John Cage's ear hearing this and being enchanted enough with it to make a composition recreating it for balafon. The arrangements happened as they happened. The hills were full of the sound of music. I wondered how long it had been since the mountains at Air Bellows heard live music in the air. 

Though I appreciated the musicianship and the becoming of each one of them, people at the beginning of doing what they really want to do so bad they have to do it without money. Tough it. I felt good for them in their journey. Their mountain sound holds on in my mind. I have to figure that it's because each one of them figured out their instruments on their own, picked up old-time music on their own and figured it out. The mountain sound is in them like it's in their blood. It's that they play from the heart. They pick up a tune, work it out the way it sounds good to them, then hit it with real old-time drive and let it roll. They catch the groove quite a lot when they play and they start laughing, fall into the groove and play it on and on. When they played Breaking up Christmas, they did it right. They played the fire out of it. Fiddler Lyle told me the band's name came from a time he was playing someplace and hit a sour screeching note. Afterward a man told him he heard the buffalo death rattle. Lyle asked what that was. It was the screech of the way-off wrong note on the fiddle. He liked the 3 words together and the meaning equally, liked them a lot. Eventually, it became the name of his band. 

Saying good-bye at the van in the road and seeing it go up the road out of sight gave my heart a warm feeling that I'd spent the last couple of days in the company of some truly wonderful human beings. The only thing I can hope for for their sakes is that they go wherever they want to go in their music. They're not eat up with ambition. If it works out, if it doesn't, whatever--they went for it, gave it a go. They have a spirit as a group that is like their music, composed of all five of them, seemingly separate from them, though dependent on them. It's a comfortable spirit of people doing what they want to do, 5 people who met in post-Katrina New Orleans playing old-time music the mountain way. I watched the van roll up the road and felt like grandpa watching his grandbabies go out into the world together to see what they can find. I can't honestly advise them. But I can honestly encourage them. They were due encouragement. I didn't want to lay it on too thick, though couldn't help but emphasize more than once, "Y'all are better than you know." I didn't want my younguns going out into the world with low self-esteem. They've got what it takes to make a band with a good-sized fan base. They're in overdrive learning as a band and as individuals. All they have to do from here on is do it. They've got all the ingredients. Throw them in the bowl and stir. Play Indian Ate a Groundhog. 

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ASHLEY OF BUFFALO DEATH RATTLE

ashley



Spent much of the day at the Willis farm "next door" (half a mile), everybody in the band hanging outside in perfect weather, practicing a new tune they were working on in varieties of gatherings. Fiddler and banjo working on it. Fiddler and guitar working on it. Lyle, who played banjo before fiddle, put in a lot of time with Dusty and the banjo, them jamming, getting the notes right, then getting the rhythm going, finally playing the tune with their full-force drive that makes them so good a band to my ear. I can't say for somebody else's ear, because I don't know. But I can tell you I heard them practicing, not often completing a whole tune, about 6 hours of hearing the different instruments working out note progressions, smoothing them when they're rough. John was working on some fiddle. Ashley worked on her accordion. What they were doing all day today is what makes them musicians and me not. I can't do the same thing over and over without end. It's why I don't practice when I've tried to learn a banjo, because I can't stand to do the same thing again and again, perfecting one note.



This is why I paint and don't make music. Every painting I work on, I'm doing it the first time. I tend to be a kind of tedious painter, work a thing to death. A justification is that I want the image to be what I see in the mind's eye, what I visualize in the initial inspiration for the image. Most often, the visualization I'm working toward changes along the way, seeing possibilities that work a little better than I was able to see before. I can see in musicians that doing something a hundred times to get it right is enjoyable, something new every time. Once I asked a friend who watched every baseball, basketball and football game on television, how can he watch these games all the time. He said, The same way you can listen to that music you listen to. And I got it, immediately. I also saw the games in a new light. No two games are alike. Each one is itself and itself alone. It's like watching flames in a fireplace. I'm also not able to practice the same thing repeatedly, because I've not felt the experience of making music, something that once it takes hold of you, you don't want to let go. Do it again.



After a year and a half of photographing musicians at Woodlawn on Friday nights, and at some other occasions, like Big Country Bluegrass in concert, I've developed a feel for framing a shot of a musician that shows both hands as clearly as possible, and the face. My pictures are based in hands and faces. I do it thinking musicians who see the picture can read the chord and see what they're doing. It is the hands and the head that make the music. When music really gets going the head has to get out of the picture and let the hands have it. But to get to that place where you can play without mind is a good bit of work for the head. Lyle, fiddler with Buffalo Death Rattle, appears to me to have the ability to leave mind at will and flow seamlessly with the music. When I'm painting musicians, the hands, the fingers I feel like need the same life energy as the face. It is the hands making the music. The face identifies whose hands they are. It's equally important to me to paint hands with the same attention I paint a face.



The camera stayed near at hand throughout the day with the band. Ashley, John and I were sitting on the grass, talking some, them talking mostly about the new tune they're working on. She was finding the new tune with the accordion and he kept rhythm for her. The sun was dropping from behind the pine branches overhead just before it fell behind the ridge across the meadow. It was hitting me in the eyes, and I was sitting there ok with it, knowing it wouldn't last long. Then I saw Ashley with that blaring back light. I picked up the camera, found the shot and made two pictures, unable to decide which one I liked the best. I'll put the second one up there too. I like them both. I'd been sitting there looking at Ashley thinking of how she has changed before my eyes as I'm getting to know her a little bit after talking and hanging out together. I thought of Woody Allen. I've seen in some of his more artful films, Stardust Memories, in particular, he takes a woman who appears rather plain in appearance the word glamorous doesn't apply to. She becomes more beautiful through the course of the film as we know her better. By the end, she is ravishingly beautiful in a truly feminine way. He has a great eye for feminine beauty.



I was looking at Ashley remembering first meeting her yesterday, a little bit distant, not quick to open to somebody she doesn't know, so I didn't push myself on her like, Hey, I wanna know you. It wasn't like that. She's a woman who has lived in the world wide awake and she hasn't missed much. I figured she knew men well enough to keep distance between herself and that old white haired turd one of the guys in the band knew. Whatever, I studied her out of the corner of my eye, found her visually interesting with homemade clothes that looked like they came out of a rag bag and tattoos in the most sensitive places on the arms, three piercings in lower lip at the edge of the lip where it really hurts like hell. I felt like her messages in the tattoos and the piercings was that she can take it. She can stand toe to toe with pain. She's a fully independent woman. She is a feminist without carrying a card. She don't take no shit offa no body for no reason. She has a firm stance that a mugger would read as somebody he cannot easily knock off balance. She is who she is and she don't want to be anything other than that, just herself. She came from the mountains of western Maryland.



Yesterday, she seemed to me rather plain by appearance. Today, as we were sitting in the shade of the white pine, I was watching her play the accordion after we'd talked some, relaxed, comfortable, and she became beautiful before my eyes, just like in a Woody Allen movie. It got to where I sat in awe of her feminine beauty, post-Germaine Greer feminine, what I think of as a woman comfortable with herself as woman. A woman who doesn't need glamor aids. Get to know her a little bit and she transformed into someone who would make a good model for a painting of Goddess, tattoos et al. Too, her feminine energy is a good anchor for the band. When Ashley had reached her full beauty before my eyes, I saw the above image, picked up the camera and turned it on. By this time, they were comfortable with me taking pictures. I don't distract by moving around and being conspicuous. I just get what I see from where I sit. The above moment happened and I went click. Thought I'd get a backup in case it might be fuzzy. Click.



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BUFFALO DEATH RATTLE

lyle

lyle

john and dusty

lyle, josh, ashley

 ashley

dusty, lyle, josh

dusty

josh

These guys are Buffalo Death Rattle. They play old-time and their own compositions in the old-time style. They've been a band less than a year. They're here in the mountains to see what jams they can find and fiddlers conventions. They'll be going to Clifftop in West Virginia. They're from all over the place, and came together in New Orleans. Josh on the bass is from Winston-Salem, grandson of Ben and Agnes Willis who had a vacation farm in Air Bellows, the old Jim Scott Place. Ben and Agnes have been gone quite awhile, and the farmhouse is now a vacation place for the grandkids, Josh the one that uses it the most. Josh has been in New Orleans for some years, went back and forth from Philadelphia a few times, and found this band he's with now is the one he wants to stay with. They are staying at the farmhouse for a few days on their road trip looking for Appalachian music.

They travel in 2 vans and play music all the time. They are together about music and music is what they do. They are at the place now in their development as a band of how to flow with each other's styles of playing, and getting the feel of the whole. I think all they need now is stage experience. They play mountain music like mountain people, and they didn't even know it. They like old-time and they like to play. Josh in the past telling me about the band apologized for them every time saying, "We play fast," as if to say it might be too much. What he calls "too fast" is what's called drive in the mountains. They have drive in abundance. The fiddler can lay it to it, too. They tore up Breaking Up Christmas, Lost Indian, Ed Haley's Indian Ate A Woodchuck, and other such fiddle tunes. I mean tore them up! I told them when they get before an audience and want to get everybody's attention, play those tunes and have everybody on their feet the whole time. The drive they have is on the order of New Ballard's Branch Bogtrotters and Whitetop Mountain Band.

The band doesn't sound like old-time played by people not of these mountains. My perhaps erroneous thinking is the people from other places learn mountain music by the mind. The mountain musicianer learns it by heart and plays it from the heart. The very first rule musicians learn in the mountains is play from the heart. Lyle is such a fiddler. He plays straight from the heart. He plays with his ears and his heart as one. Dusty, the banjo picker, used to play guitar, picked up a banjo a year and a half ago, started plucking around on it, got focused and now he's playing very respectable clawhammer he's taught himself. John, the guitar picker, is one dynamic picker. He plays details and he plays hard, both at once. He can get a rhythm going and he uses his guitar to push the band through the waves of the music. He keeps the rhythm solid and plays melody with the banjo as well.

Before they started making music, I heard them apologize that they're not very good, that they don't have it together yet as a band. I suppose it was all their apologizing before they played that gave me the surprise at hearing them make music, respectable mountain music, the real deal. I want to tell all my musician friends about these people, maybe get a few videos on YouTube where they can be heard. They are just now starting to think about things like that. At this place in their development as a band, this trip is intensive practice, picking every day, finding their flow together. I told them I believe they'd be very well received at the Rex Theater on a Friday night. I believe they'd be well received at any place in these mountains they might play. It was a joy for me to hear them playing Appalachian music in Appalachia the first day, and already having the sound. I believe they have the sound because they each learned their instrument the old-time way, figure it out and how you figure it out becomes your style. Each one has his/her own style of playing that's not like anybody else. Josh the musician continues to blow my mind.  

Ashley is playing fiddle tunes on the accordion with the fiddle. They sound good together. It's even along the line of an autoharp with a fiddle in its sound. Instead of being a separate sound, it enhances the fiddle's sound as if it were coming from the fiddle. She is playing viola too. Sometimes banjo plays note for note with the fiddle and they sound good together. Josh I've known him since he was a youngun playing soccer in jr hi. I knew his grandparents, his parents, uncles, aunts, brother, sister, cousins, over the years of being next door neighbor with the Willis farm. When Josh was at Chapel Hill, he had different bands doing post-punk noise kind of Mercury Rev thing. Band mates he'd bring to the mountains sometimes to retreat and make music. I'd go over and have a concert of some dynamic sounds. Josh is a good musician all the way around. Good songwriter, good singer and a bass player who plays individual notes on the bass, fingers of both hands going. He's played bass for a long time. He plays banjo too, figured it out on his own and has his own style.

It's always been a treat of a concert when Josh brought his present band to the farm. Because all the musicians he's had here in the past have been real artist musicians, I figured these guys would be too. When they started playing this evening just before sunset, I was surprised and not surprised at once by what I was hearing. It was no surprise that they were as good as they were at making mountain music, but it was a big surprise that they are a very respectable old-time band. Their drive is just right. From here on, they learn tunes together, talk about arrangements, live totally in their music, develop their sound with hundreds, then thousands of hours of stage experience, make recordings to sell at gigs. They have a facebook page now with links to a few videos. Write buffalo death rattle in the search box on facebook and you'll be there. I think they have a few things on youTube too. We talked about making some video tomorrow for YouTube. That will be awesome. I like their spirit.

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