Saturday morning. Different crowd on the weekends: the retirees playing scrabble, blue-collar folks in their Bible-study groups, new parents with infants and grandparents.
Good presentation this AM by Mac Tire--dry run for her presentation on Irish traditional flute playing at National Flute Association convention in ABQ, which Dharmonia and I have the good fortune to be attending purely as tourists, visiting with Quantzalcoatl and spouse. May get a music session with old friend Roger Landes here on the Saturday: look in or drop a line if you'll be in the area.
Still working on Eric Lott--damn this book is good: essentially a post-modern Marxist reading of the racial and gender attraction / aversion / appropriation dynamics in early blackface minstrelsy. Very useful for terms, tools, and formulations to aid looking at minstrelsy as "doing social work." Will style need to be supplemented in my own work with analysis of performance practice and musical collaboration: my pilot article coming out in this journal will lay out the template.
As a teaser: here's a short tune transcribed from the artists' archival materials with which I'll be working in September, about which the artist's brother said:
While in Hillsboro I heard a short Reel played which I was so well pleased with that I took the notes of it. If you wish to give it the Negro-touch, you must raise the bass string one note. I will endeavor to collect something better if a favorable opportunity should occur, until then you may saw away on :
To work.
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Now playing: Joseph Spence - Conch ain't got no bone
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