Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Thanksgiving Cornucopia


That's Grandma Ann hanging out in her living room on the eastern shore of Maryland. 95 years old and full of laughter, good cheer, and yeah, some well-earned piss&vinegar intransigence every now and then. This past summer she had to stay in a nursing home of sorts to recover from some heart and lung issues. For lunch one day we got in the automobile and took ourselves out to a favorite place of hers on the water. She'd lost her hearing-aid at the nursing home, so she had a rigged hearing-aid in place. While it helped, she was not really able to participate in the conversation. So she sat there in silence, enjoying her delicious crabcake sandwich at a spot she'd been to many many times over her long life. As it came time to leave, Grandma Ann tried repeatedly to get up from the bench. I was sitting opposite her and watched as she tried again and again to stand up on her own (she refused help). After the fifth or so time, she sat back down, looked straight at me and said with real joy "this has been a wonderful day." Here's a woman near the end of her life, dependent upon a walker to get around, spending most of the hours of her days in a nursing home, and seemingly not capable of standing up on her own - a set of circumstances I'd call frustrating, to say the least - and the words close to her lips are words of thanks. It broke my heart. And it made me question my easy frustrations, my easy words of disappointment, my easy selfishness. The world moves pretty fast and we find endless ways to justify our petty actions and words, never slowing down to think about just how little we are asking of ourselves as we stroll through the world with ever-reliable blinders on. Thankfulness resides inside of you, right now, this moment. Grandma Ann showed you so.

This six-pack is for her.

The first coldie to get cracked features Gaither Carlton on fiddle and his son-in-law Doc Watson on guitar. Taken from the Friends of Old Time Music boxset, here's what Watson had to say about "Double File":

It’s an old tune they used to square dance to a long time ago. They used to have some of them old shindigs and just about shake the log cabins down. Boy, they’d really romp it up, I’m telling you.

"Boy, they'd really romp it up" does a pretty good job of summing of the rest of the set as well.

Doc Watson & Gaither Carlton- Double File

Elvis Perkins - Stop Drop Rock and Roll

Sir Douglas Band- San Francisco FM Blues

Andre Williams & 2 Star Tabernacle - Jet Black Daddy Lilly White Mama

Dexateens - Spark

The Faces - Devotion

No Thanksgiving would be complete without a little ol' Grateful Dead. Here's a show from November 24th, 1972, when the Dead played Dallas.


While running in circles on the youtube last night I found Levon hanging out with Sissy Spacek in 1980, right about the time they played the father and daughter roles in Coalminer's Daughter. In her biography, Loretta says that one of her daughter's came up to her after listening to Spacek singing one of Lynn's tunes and saying "mama, she sounds more like you than you do." So let's serve another six pack just for the hell of it.











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