A Mourning Dove
and my first Merlefest
There’s a Jesse Stuart story, “Thanksgiving Hunter,” where the boy narrator Shan is out with a group of older men, hardened to death, and in a moment alone he comes across a dove with both its eyes gone from a near miss with a shotgun. He knows at some level that he’s condemning the bird to a slower death by cold and starvation, but he still can’t bring himself to finish it off.
Mourning doves are common around here. They visit our bird feeder in pairs or small flocks. The sad calls that earned them their name start early in the morning.
My older brother told me a story once. It was winter in the barnyard. The cows’ constant pissing and shitting had long ago turned the ground to steaming mud, churned by their hooves into a lumpy brown lunar landscape. In one of the craters he found a kitten that had been stepped on by a cow and shoved down into the muck before it froze completely. Its spine was crushed, but it had survived the night and was mewing weakly for its mother. Not that much older than the narrator Shan, he went and found a rock and crushed its head.
That story might or might not be true. Given last year’s experience accidentally running over a chipmunk with my bike, and how quickly that little thing died, the story seems unlikely.
I certainly never saw the supposed kitten, and my brother was not as scrupulous about separating fact from fiction as I try to be in my daily life1. On multiple occasions, with no evidence whatsoever, he tried to convince me that I was born with a tail. Anything to “get a rise” out of me.
Like all the other riders and clowns in the testosterone rodeo, he was capable of petty cruelties. Minor things, but they were what I chose to pay attention to, and what informed my opinions of him at the time.
He’s been dead for fifteen years now. He still appears in my dreams once in a while, especially in the spring when he died, or when I’m reminded by another suicide. The “scientific obituary” I wrote for him in IGMS, source of the quote above, is still one of my favorite pieces I did for them.
Merlefest
This is held on the campus of Wilkes Community College, which is state property, which means it’s dry. They actually search your bags and coolers on the way in. The lack of alcohol changes the crowd, which is older than most, though there are some families there with babies and small children too. The two adjacent stages setup, which I’d encountered here locally at The Back Table during a Hurricane Helene fundraiser, meant that there was essentially no set-up downtime. The smaller Cabin Stage allowed smaller bands to serve as short bridges between the longer sets of the larger, more famous acts. It was honestly better-run, in that way, than our local Folk Festival, though at $90 for a one-day ticket that’s not really a fair comparison. The Folk Festival has a handful of paid staff to put on a free show in a more complex downtown environment, while the life of the city continues around them.
Still, Merlefest was impressive on multiple levels, especially their control of the weather.
Jake Shimabakuro and the Electric Mayhem
The album on YouTube, Calm Seas, is instrumental soundscape stuff (the first track also has cool bird footage from his native Hawaii), but his festival set has him shredding on the electric ukelele along with his bass player. He doesn’t sing, but he mouths the lyrics and exaggerates his facial expressions for the jumbotron screens. I can totally see him playing with pianist Dr. Teeth and drummer Animal on The Muppet Show. He looks like a kid, but’s only six years younger than I am. Maybe he remembers that show. Probably not.
Union Station
Allison Krauss is only one year younger than me, but she’s been touring since she was a child. Thirty-eight years with the same band, she said during the headline show, which would have made her thirteen or fourteen. Her solo album Forget About It was our small child’s preferred bedtime music for years, so when she did the title track my wife and I were both pretty verklempt.
I had no idea AK was so funny. All her songwriting is, as she put it, “sad and pitiful.” Her stage persona is a deadpan ditz act, with her wide smile and breathy mourning dove voice. To paraphrase one well-delivered bit:
Our guitar player Rob has had some struggles, as so many in the bluegrass community have, but Merlefest feels like family, so I asked him if it would be okay to talk about this, and he said yes. He’s in his sixth year of recovery from being a vegetarian. He was born in California, so it’s not his fault. He never really had a chance.
That’s what reminded me of The Muppet Show. Like reality shows now, variety shows were a staple of the 1970s, mixing music and often lame sketch comedy (though Carol Burnett was sometimes hilarious to k-12 me)2. Even Johnny Cash had one, though I don’t remember ever seeing it. We watched Donny & Marie, and Sonny & Cher, and a whole awful lot of Hee-Haw. My mom was a fan of Laurence Welk too.
Another variety-show device that I hadn’t seen in a long time, which the headliners used very effectively, was the medley. Fans get to recognize their favorites, sometimes with different arrangements3, and the band gets to spend more of their precious stage time playing extended versions of newer stuff that people haven’t heard and might be inspired to buy.
Donna the Buffalo
Given that they’re from western New York, where they started a Finger Lakes Music Festival, not that far from Rochester, it’s surprising to me that I’d never encountered them before. They’re a lifestyle band, like the Grateful Dead or Phish, and they’ve been around since 1989. I’d heard the name lots of times. We stopped by for a couple of numbers and saw more of their fans dancing than at any other show of the day.
Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra
This Norwegian band (don’t laugh; there is also supposedly a vibrant bluegrass scene in Japan!) had a really fun song about being approached by a mansplainer in a bar who mistakes politeness for interest. I wish I could remember any of the lyrics. They made the joke during the show that they had discovered it was allowed to write songs without trains in them (though there are certainly more trains in Europe than there are here now).
Dom Flemens
A&T alum and former Carolina Chocolate Drop Dom Flemens, who plays around here all the time, has a new band. He does lean towards the historical, but it’s black history, like “Nobody Wrote It Down” and his tribute to Arnold Schultz, one of the unknown and uncredited musicians who inspired Bill Monroe to create “bluegrass” in the first place.
https://bluegrasstoday.com/dom-flemons-looking-forward-and-back-at-the-same-time/
https://www.thebluegrassstandard.com/post/dom-flemons-on-arnold-shultz-the-godfather-of-bluegrass
He apparently has a radio show now (with a podcast version, of course), which I haven’t listened to yet but is probably pretty good. I’ve always appreciated the former CCD’s mix of practical and scholarly approaches to music, and their willingness to throw in a little beat-boxing, just for fun.
Who Fears the Devil?
I also loved Manly Wade Wellman’s short stories about John the Balladeer (the later novels somewhat less so), whose quick wits and silver-strung guitar were his usual weapons against the supernatural. I mentioned this last week but didn’t get into it.
Wellman is much beloved in the SF and horror communities, in part because nobody seems to pay attention to his inconvenient Confederate leanings. Alfred Bester wrote of meeting him in 1939:
“It’s my recollection that one of his hands was slightly shriveled, which may have been why he came on so strong for the Confederate cause. We were all very patient with that; after all, our side won the war.”
I’m not sure what those two things have to do with one another. I only mention it because both episodes 6 & 7 of this Roald Dahl podcast we were listening to in the car on the way to Merlefest are one long aside about his antisemitism and whether it’s morally OK to let your kids read his work.
This is a non-issue for me. From one of my very first posts here4:
I personally have zero problem separating authors from their works, in part because I try not to put authors on a pedestal in the first place. I mean, I am one. Seriously, do not be impressed. It’s just talking on paper.
I bought the print that heads this issue from the artist, in person, with cash. Many of the books I have read I didn’t pay for, because they were advance reader copies (when my wife was a bookseller) or because I bought them used, which did not benefit the author. And you know what? It probably matters to that one artist, who has bills to pay. But I don’t think it matters at scale. It is not dead authors who are corrupting our political processes or lobbying for extended copyrights, or advertising sports betting, or whatever. It’s corporations, the subjects of one of my favorite newsletters.
Choose your battles, y’all.
The story behind the paywall this week deals with those particular frustrations in rather direct ways. It has been rejected by at least two different magazines. Climb on over and see what that’s about.
