Saturday, October 10, 2009

Carolina Chocolate Drops in Morgantown, NC


Wow. Tonight, for a couple of hours, Morgantown, NC, became the temporary headquarters of the world of music as the Carolina Chocolate Drops lifted the town from its foundations so it could dance in the air with joy.

These guys are good, and they are a blast. If you haven't seen them, drop whatever else you have planned and end your pursuit of happiness by joining them in their next performance. To say they have rhythm is to compare them with ordinary groups. To call their music "toe-tapping" is to ignore the rest of your body that you will find yourself also tapping to their performance. They can speed up music until it becomes a brand new dimension. The photograph accompanying this post looks like a long-range photo made from a balcony under dim lighting conditions at slow-shutter speed. Wrong - it actually was made with a new scientific camera operating at 1/8,000 of a second - they are THAT fast!

The main reason for attending one of their performances though, is to get happy. The Carolina Chocolate Drops are obviously SO happy in the work they do that the joy flows into the audience where it is transmuted into more happy rhythm. The group played guitar, banjo, fiddle, psalter?, jug, harmonica, castinets, spoons, jew's harp, penny whistle?, drums, and even the amazing whatnot. They also sang, danced and performed some acrobatics.

Thursday, October 08, 2009

The Piedmont - shed


Here is the Piedmont with its gravel drive,
the always-cut grass, the great old tree.
There’s a chicken yard and a dog kennel,
attatched to this neat old shed.
But the greatest icon of them all
is the pole with a basket, backboard and goal!
Sure, it’s battered and bent from many a shot
but it shows to every passer-by that the only
true color in our whole world
is the color that we call blue.