(no subject)
Sep. 28th, 2003 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillYesterday I went to the Townsend Heritage Festival. I thought it was going to be mostly music, and for me it was, but it was surrounded by a shell of craft booths and food booths, a pony ride, a molasses making booth (I'm not sure whether to call this craft or food), a petting zoo and a couple of very full parking lots.
Townsend is a little town at the northwestern border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the route I chose to get there took me through Sevierville (pronounced "severe-ville" here) and Pigeon Forge (which apparently had a blacksmith and passenger pigeons back when it was named). I mention this because Sevierville and Pigeon Forge are widely thought of as tourist traps by the folks who live up here an hour north. I just figured I'd drive past the tourist traps and keep going but forgot that tourist traps are frequently clogged with tourists. Oh well. Next time I'll try to find a different route. The road from Pigeon Forge to Townsend is very pretty though, winding in and around the folds of the mountains.
The event itself was a lot of fun. There was a great bluegrass band on stage, including one thirteen year old girl acting as spokesperson, lead singer, and a really smokin' mandolin player. Strangely enough though, the other members of the group were all grown men (one of them was her Dad), head and shoulders taller than she was. This theme continued throughout my wanderings and kept surprising me. In the areas where I used to play and sing, women tended to significantly outnumber men in music; here it is completely the other way around. There were dozens of musicians milling around in the woods (it's still hot enough here that we seek the shade) and I think I may have seen eight women, counting me.
I wasn't very good compared to the other musicians there, so I did the mosquito thing: hang out and try to play along with the group for a few songs, then drift off before I got so annoying that someone would swat me. I got lots of practice playing along with songs I didn't know and I'm getting pretty good at finding workable harmonies in a couple of repetitions of the song if I do say so myself. A couple of times I even found the melody to play along. But I hardly know any chords on the mandolin, and I hardly know any of the local songs. Next year I'll be better. What I'd really like to be able to do is play melody or a really good harmony, and fills at the ends of the lines.
In an effort to learn some more of the local repertoire, and also because the guy impresses me, I asked Frank Hart if he had any CDs out, since I'd seen his tape. He did, so I bought one, and carefully slipped it into what I thought was my pocket and zipped it up. Alas, as I discovered hours later, I'd actually slipped it into the armpit vent of my parka, which was tied around my waist because I could see it was going to rain *some*time that day. Naturally it spent a few seconds held in place by the friction of the doubled layers of coat, then fell out when I wasn't paying attention to it anymore. I checked lost and found but no dice. But Frank gave me another one when he heard about it! I put this one carefully away in my mandolin case--I knew I wasn't going to let go of that.
Shortly after that it started to pour, and I put my parka on. The musicians just melted away, and I figured I wasn't going to bring my mandolin out in the rain to play it. There wasn't much "indoors" to be had--a cover over the main stage, the visitor center itself which had been choked with people before it started raining, and a cover over the storytelling area was pretty much it except for the booths, which were also being evacuated. I walked back to my car, ate lunch while waiting for the rain to stop, practiced the closed scale on the mandolin some more, and poked my head out half an hour later to discover that the rain had settled in to a gentle soaking drizzle that appeared to be in it for the long haul. So I went home again.
I drove home with jam in my ears again, chord changes and mandolin runs ringing in my head all the way home.
Townsend is a little town at the northwestern border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the route I chose to get there took me through Sevierville (pronounced "severe-ville" here) and Pigeon Forge (which apparently had a blacksmith and passenger pigeons back when it was named). I mention this because Sevierville and Pigeon Forge are widely thought of as tourist traps by the folks who live up here an hour north. I just figured I'd drive past the tourist traps and keep going but forgot that tourist traps are frequently clogged with tourists. Oh well. Next time I'll try to find a different route. The road from Pigeon Forge to Townsend is very pretty though, winding in and around the folds of the mountains.
The event itself was a lot of fun. There was a great bluegrass band on stage, including one thirteen year old girl acting as spokesperson, lead singer, and a really smokin' mandolin player. Strangely enough though, the other members of the group were all grown men (one of them was her Dad), head and shoulders taller than she was. This theme continued throughout my wanderings and kept surprising me. In the areas where I used to play and sing, women tended to significantly outnumber men in music; here it is completely the other way around. There were dozens of musicians milling around in the woods (it's still hot enough here that we seek the shade) and I think I may have seen eight women, counting me.
I wasn't very good compared to the other musicians there, so I did the mosquito thing: hang out and try to play along with the group for a few songs, then drift off before I got so annoying that someone would swat me. I got lots of practice playing along with songs I didn't know and I'm getting pretty good at finding workable harmonies in a couple of repetitions of the song if I do say so myself. A couple of times I even found the melody to play along. But I hardly know any chords on the mandolin, and I hardly know any of the local songs. Next year I'll be better. What I'd really like to be able to do is play melody or a really good harmony, and fills at the ends of the lines.
In an effort to learn some more of the local repertoire, and also because the guy impresses me, I asked Frank Hart if he had any CDs out, since I'd seen his tape. He did, so I bought one, and carefully slipped it into what I thought was my pocket and zipped it up. Alas, as I discovered hours later, I'd actually slipped it into the armpit vent of my parka, which was tied around my waist because I could see it was going to rain *some*time that day. Naturally it spent a few seconds held in place by the friction of the doubled layers of coat, then fell out when I wasn't paying attention to it anymore. I checked lost and found but no dice. But Frank gave me another one when he heard about it! I put this one carefully away in my mandolin case--I knew I wasn't going to let go of that.
Shortly after that it started to pour, and I put my parka on. The musicians just melted away, and I figured I wasn't going to bring my mandolin out in the rain to play it. There wasn't much "indoors" to be had--a cover over the main stage, the visitor center itself which had been choked with people before it started raining, and a cover over the storytelling area was pretty much it except for the booths, which were also being evacuated. I walked back to my car, ate lunch while waiting for the rain to stop, practiced the closed scale on the mandolin some more, and poked my head out half an hour later to discover that the rain had settled in to a gentle soaking drizzle that appeared to be in it for the long haul. So I went home again.
I drove home with jam in my ears again, chord changes and mandolin runs ringing in my head all the way home.
