Am I in the cool yet? After 20 years of blogging!?

Oh my! The second pandemic year of 2021 is almost over and I haven't added a new page here since December 2019! Here's a lot of catching up in a short space... and a plug for one of my most recent musical discoveries -- not an old video clip like previous entries here, but a podcast that has accumulated something like 300 hours of music and musician interviews, "Get Up In the Cool." Its name, by the way, is from a tune recorded in 1929 by Eck Robertson that makes me think about climbing up to Rocky Knob in Floyd, Va., on a hot summer day. But the podcast is cool in another way. More about that in a minute. First, a couple of my own short smartphone video clips...

I have been playing and listening to music at home and at outdoor jam sessions like that one on the street in Floyd and others in Blacksburg and Radford, Va., after social-distancing rules and vaccination made sharing music possible again. And I have been writing about those things -- but on Facebook and YouTube, not here. 

The Floyd Country Store Sunday afternoon jams eventually moved back indoors, as shown above, but as winter approaches, most of the others still have not found homes. Online through 2020 and 2021, I have attended Floyd Country Store, Floyd Handmade Music School and Augusta Heritage Workshop friends' "Zoom" and YouTube events, and finally -- "armed" with two vaccinations, a booster and flu shot, went to the October Augusta Heritage Center Old-Time Retreat for music classes, jams, and even some singing and dancing.

Alas, the week I returned was the start of a month-long cold that made sleeping through the night difficult, but even that was an excuse for musical discovery: I'd heard of, but had not explored, an oldtime fiddle-and-banjo oriented podcast called "Get Up In the Cool," which turned out to be a wonderful way to spend those sleepless nights. 

Before I started listening, banjo virtuoso and interviewer Cameron DeWhitt had already accumulated 270 interview-jams with fiddlers and banjo players across the U.S. and Canada, including current friends and teachers of mine from Ithaca to Dittyville -- and even Hank Bradley, an inspiring guitar, banjo and fiddle player I studied with back around 1978 and have not seen since!

I hope all of these links aren't overwhelming... but at least I feel I'm getting caught up on the latest incarnation of Blogger, including the ability to easily post my YouTube clips and switch between a modern "Compose view" and vintage 20th century "HTML view" of the page I'm writing.

Blog history... 

In addition to noticing that I have been neglecting this blog for almost two years, I noticed today that this blog is now 20 years old! Hosted-for-free blogs are like that... people lose interest, regain interest... sometimes they even die. I knew a "serial blogger" called Jimbo -- interested in music and old-time radio -- who died a few years ago, leaving behind probably thousands of pages of his writing on linked-together podcasts and blogs about various 1930s to 1960s radio shows, none of them signed with his real name.

My "Blogger" site started in a classroom at Emerson College, where I taught a freshmen seminar called "Digital Culture: Mediamorphosis," in which students explored media history while learning to use Web tools and Photoshop. The second time I taught the course, one of the students asked why I was having the class write raw HTML code on a campus server to create what I called "weblogs" when there was a new tool called Blogger designed to do the same thing with less work. 

The point was that I wanted the class to learn about the page-markup language that was "behind the curtain" at all websites. But I was embarrassed. I had used a couple of other "edit this page" online publishing sites, but at that point Blogger (or "Blogspot") was off my radar, so of course I gave it a try. And this site is the result. Over the years I would create other blogs and websites with Radio Userland, Manila, WordPress, Django, Drupal and more. 

But this one -- thanks to Google's ownership -- is the oldest of my "free hosting" sites. This "Boblog" has evolved over the years from classroom-discussion demo to regular postings, either personal or journalism-class-related (especially 2008-2009 at Radford U, after my Radio Userland host went out of business and while I was in transition to WordPress), and finally reborn as an occasional space for writing about music, while my other sites, stepno.com, jheroes.com and stepno.wordpress.com fill other needs.

Tunes to Learn (or at least play along with)

Mac's Tune of the Week

I'm making some shortcuts to this local Southwest Virginia tune list, via Mac Traynham and the Floyd Country Store's Handmade Music School...

1. downbeat... one?
2. two?
3. three?
4. Shootin' Creek
5. Flying Indian
6. Sweet Grapes
7. Cuffy
8. Rachel
9. coming soon?
   
   Bonus:
     A thank-you to Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck for contributing to the support of the music program

My first fiddle contest....

I didn't play the fiddle then... And I barely do now... And I didn't compete in any contest, but in the 1970s the New England Fiddle Contest in Hartford was one of the major landmarks in each year... And in one or two of them I got to write articles or take pictures that wound up in the Hartford Courant... Including this 1979 story, which the late Paul Lemay, organizer of the contest, included in the press kit he sent out each year, along with the picture or two that I had taken... I was reminded today that the internet archive had saved parts of his FiddleFest website, launched when he revived the contest around 1998 or 1999.

Alas, someone let the domain registration go after Paul died, so the original site is no longer about fiddling.

Coffee shop withdrawal, but the band plays on

I'm seriously annoyed that a cold, Tuesday classes, winter weather and general procrastination have kept me away from the Monday night Fiddle & Banjo Jam at the Coffee Mill in Radford all winter... especially since the Coffee Mill was my favorite place in town and has been struggling for a year.

Now it has pulled the plug, at least until some new owner steps up and smells the coffee, or opportunity, or something.

It's hard to believe a college town can't support one independent coffee shop a five minute walk from campus. However, the university houses an on-campus Starbucks, an Au Bon Pain and a Ben & Jerry's with Green Mountain Coffee. I think they all accept students' parent-subsidized meal cards. Even with free wifi, that was a lot for the Coffee Mill to compete with.

On the other hand, closing at 5 p.m. most nights was no way to encourage students to come down off the hill, and a recent decision to close on Sundays killed my pattern of weekly homework-grading visits.

The coffeeshop's only regular evening event was the Monday Fiddle & Banjo Jam, which packed the house, but catered more to bluegrass fans than to the average Radford student... and probably didn't make much money, since the place was so crowded you couldn't get to the counter to order another scone, quiche or latte -- words you won't hear in many bluegrass lyrics.

Anyhow, along with missing some great music on Mondays, I've missed a chance to congratulate maestro Ralph Berrier on his new book, so I'll throw a few links here.

Ralph calls his If Trouble Don’t Kill Me, "the true story of my music-playing grandfather and his twin brother..."

His home page is streaming about 15 minutes of a 1942 Christmas broadcast by Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers on WDBJ in Roanoke, complete with Dr Pepper commercial and nice renditions of Fireball Mail, Deep Ellum Blues and more.

If you're not from around here, you may have missed Ralph's project at The Roanoke Times, mapping Virginia's
Crooked Road traditional music events and venues.

Meanwhile, the good news is that Ralph is keeping the Fiddle & Banjo jam alive by moving it a mile or so down Main Street to Wade's Supermarket.

Until I went looking to confirm the rumor, I didn't even realize the session had its own Website!: http://www.radfordfiddle.com.

I've just gotta get out more.

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A couple of loosely related stories by Ralph:

• The Crooked Road, Virginia's heritage music trail, is recognized by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
  
• "Crazy Heart" writer-director Scott Cooper grew up in Abingdon, where he heard the sound of the mountains.