« Dream | Main | Ruminations on the fall of civilization »
July 17, 2008
bluegrass vs. Irish
I'm in a gorgeous-by-day, creepy-by-night, economically depressed town in the Catskills region to play banjo with a bunch of other bluegrass neophytes at a festival. There happens to be an Irish music festival here at the same time. The contrast between bluegrass and traditional Irish music is hilarious. For the past two days, I've been immersed in songs about how one's mother and father are dead and one's blue-eyed girl was alive but she slept with somebody else so now she's dead, because one beat her over the head with one's moonshine jug. There's an entire subcategory of about 8000 songs that are instructions to your next of kin on where or where not to bury you.
And then I stepped into this bar last night where about 40 people were playing ancient Irish folk songs, and it was like I just walked into the Podling village in The Dark Crystal before the Garthim attack. The pure, nuclear-powered joy threatened to explode the place.
Also, everyone I've been playing bluegrass with looks like they were scraped off the back wall of a closet five minutes before they got here. The Irish people are all exuberant and young-looking, even if they're not young (and many of them are). Some cute chick kept smiling at me so I went over and talked to her. The best I've gotten from a bluegrass girl has been a moonshine jug hurled at my face.
Posted by tony at July 17, 2008 07:27 AM
