Notes from Nashville: May 9, 2024
sports we're not supposed to care about • a retraction • a film with 20,000 extras and 500 head of buffalo • and: gigs!
HELLO!
We send cheery springtime greetings from cicada-covered East Nashville!
Before getting into all the news, here are our summertime-up-north dates, including a couple freshly-added ones:
June 21: Bethlehem, PA / Godfrey Daniels
June 22: Spruce Creek, PA / Colerain Center
July 13: Paul Smiths, NY / Paul Smith’s VIC
July 27: Cabot, VT / Cabot Music & Arts Festival
Aug 2: Saratoga Springs, NY / Caffe Lena
Aug 28: Whately, MA / Watermelon Wednesdays
TOUR REPORT
We’re overdue to give you the scoop on our outing to Georgia and North Carolina—it was a great time!
Our first stop on the tour was the Savannah Music Festival, where we played two shows that were co-bills with the Lena Jonsson Trio. The SMF is a beautifully run event, and it’s an honor to be invited. They never cease to impress me with the scope and diversity of their programming, their attention to detail, and just general good vibes. And how smart and delightful that they paired us with Lena! Her fiddling is so yummy, and the trio was fab.
From there it was on to my old stomping ground of Asheville, NC, to play at the Tina McGuire theater in the Wortham Center downtown. The show was organized by Chatt Hills Music, and we’re grateful for the work they put in to get the word out—we played to a sold-out house of great listeners, and it was a joy.
Next up was Greensboro, NC, and a cool room called The Crown, which is a concert space upstairs at the Carolina Theatre. We enjoyed wandering the bustling neighborhood before the gig, and felt so welcomed by the staff and the unexpectedly large audience. Having never played there before, we were very surprised to have folks making requests and singing along with us. Amazing.
Thanks to everyone who came out to these shows. Y’all are the very best.
SPORTING NEWS
I’ve just returned from an extremely busy tour of Ireland with Joachim Cooder. While I was gone, KK was charging ahead with collecting thoughts and online tidbits related to folk golf. So if you have interest in this odd little sideline of ours, keep an eye on the new GOLF page on our website (which you can also access by typing in folkgolf.org). We set it up as a blog, because we want there to be comments! More to come on all of this… of course.
Speaking of sports that folk musicians aren’t supposed to care about: HOCKEY! Our Nashville Predators got knocked out of the Stanley Cup playoffs in the first round. But given where we started this season it’s astonishing we made it to the playoffs at all, so: well done, Preds!
But toward the end of the season is when the trades happen, too, and we—once again!—had to watch our favorite player get traded away. This time it was Yakov Trenin, whom we adored from the get-go. In general, neither of us are particularly fazed by meeting famous people, but the time we spotted Trenin in the produce section at Whole Foods we nearly passed out. KK managed to express something to him about how much we admire his playing while I looked on in awe from over by the zucchini. We’ll miss having him on the ice and in the grocery store. We expressed big feelings about hockey trades in song last season, and it still applies.
MOVIE CORNER: The Big Trail (1930)
We’d seen this one before but rewatched it recently and holy moly it’s an astonishing piece of work on SO MANY LEVELS. Gorgeous to look at and utterly staggering in its scale and authenticity. Check out this great essay at the Library of Congress to more fully appreciate how truly bananas the whole undertaking was.
Go watch it for free on YouTube—and then report back!
An Apology & Retraction
In our last newsletter I said “I guess how-Covid-treated-us stories have become pretty tired small talk, so I’ll spare you…”. My very smart and aware music pal Anna Roberts-Gevalt responded with loving pushback against that statement. She’s so right, and I’m glad she took the time to write back.
In reality, I had started to write about my disconcerting experience with “mild” Covid, but then deleted it and was dismissive of my own desire to share. And that dismissiveness is partly because we have so powerfully received a message that we’ve moved on, no one wants to hear about your symptoms. Or maybe I thought you’re not special, everyone has had it. It’s hard to articulate where the self-censoring comes from. But the reality is that this virus is still far scarier than a cold or flu. The many insidious ways it affects people are still being puzzled over. People are still dying and being disabled by it.
So I want to apologize for being flippant about such a serious illness. If you’ve suffered from Long Covid or lost loved ones or simply had a miserable time being sick with this damnable virus, I’m sending you a big hug. Your experience is real and true and a bummer. You’re allowed to say so. We all are.
STAY TUNED
Thanks a bunch for reading! If you have friends you think might enjoy our chatter, please forward this on to them. And we always welcome your questions and observations, so please drop your thoughts in the comments.
Till soon —
xo rg & kk
PS: Dig this killer concert footage of the Dixie Hummingbirds (shoutout to Kendall Kent for all the musical sharing he does on his YouTube channel).
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A fan of your music and of westerns, especially, perhaps, later more revisionist westerns (e.g. Anthony Mann’s excellent Jimmy Stewart westerns). But I also do love more classic westerns, including John Ford’s films. As a dual US/UK national, who grew up and lived and worked mainly in the UK, I have a great love for US history and culture, but also likely a skeptical eye for its own myth-making.
On the strength of your recommendation, I checked out The Big Trail (1930).
It is certainly worth watching but is a mixture of good and bad things. Directed by Raoul Walsh, the great film noir / gangster film director, the film relatively faithfully shows the long journey of a wagon train of white settlers to the northeast of the USA during the era of western expansion.
Great documentary-style scenes documenting typical lives for these settlers and also the hardships of crossing rivers, of transporting wagons, livestock and families down cliff faces, and battling blizzards and deluges of rain. Despite the use of real native Americans to play the roles of their ancestors and the notional comradeship of the wagon train’s scout with local native Americans, the awful exceptionalism of the settlers is not only plain to see, but actually championed, in a kind of homage to US “manifest destiny” of expansionism. At one point, a query about the ownership of the land to which they are headed is answered by ignoring the rights of the native Americans whose homeland it is and saying the land belongs to a recent arrival, a non-native trapper. When local resistance armed with bows and arrows is defeated by hugely superior guns and bullets, the many many native Americans we have seen slaughtered are unacknowledged as the settlers mourn their dead in a relatively small number of graves – shades of the current genocide in Gaza?
Another problem is sexism. Of course, it is the women who are shown as doing all the hard daily domestic chores, with the men (presumably) left to the heavier chores, as well as manly tasks like hunting (and killing native Americans). John Wayne, in his first leading role, is young and fit, but his character clearly has not had the concept of consensual kissing impressed on him, more than once sneaking up behind a young woman he has not seen in years and in a surprise stealth attack, snatching her up, pinioning her arms so she can’t resist and kissing her, unasked for, on the lips. In another scene, a young woman whose mental faculties have perhaps been whistleblown by her limited mode of expression (giggling) is being married off to a man in a trailside ceremony.
Thanks, Rayna and Kieran, and yes, we do need to have a national discussion/reckoning about how Covid affected and changed us as a society. We really can't "move on" until we do.