Catching up, part two

[catsittingstill]

Sunday: Ernest, June, Shannon, Joc and I had a musical get-together at Ernest and June's house, in Norris (about an hour from our house). It was a lot of fun. Shannon plays the mountain dulcimer, Joc normally plays saxophone but was fooling around on the pennywhistle, June plays autoharp (and normally sings, I think, but was getting over a cold) Ernest plays guitar and is learning the banjo and I mostly played mandolin, but guitar sometimes. Feather garnered a lot of admiration, but though Ernest tried him out, the transposing-in-your-head issue was enough of a stumbling block that I was the only one who played him with other instruments. Feather gets this reaction a lot. But everyone agrees he has a great sound and good action and a nice wide fingerboard.

Anyway, we did a rockin' version of This Land Is Your Land, and Cripple Creek (after which Shannon said (roughly) "we've just gotten as Appalachian as we're ever going to get," since that's a classic) and The Water Is Wide, and I tried out Lord Franklin on them, which everyone agreed was a beautiful song, but we just couldn't get it together as a group piece. Outside the picture window a blue jay and a cardinal came by at different times and Joc said it was a good sign that the birds came to our music instead of fleeing it. There was also a dark hummingbird with a yellow throat that didn't look like anything in my bird book.

Shannon and I talked about getting together sometime a little closer to our respective houses. I should e-mail her about that :-).