It’s fall y'all! We're sitting outside a barn surrounded by trees shedding leaves in the wind. Added musical textures, a legendary fiddler, sporadic notes and sounds make up the balance of this week’s soundscape (see below for more). Whether you're studying, working, sleeping, or unwinding after a long day, this immersive, ambient soundscape provides the perfect background. No interruptions, no ads. Saa-lute! Ignore the world. ____________________ Ok, so this week we are doing a Mid-Atlantic fall pastiche! More granularly—we are going to imagine ourselves in the television variety program Hee Haw but outside and in the real world. Hee Haw was a television variety show that ran from the 70's into early 90's and was the only program my grandparents watched that didn’t suck (how many ****** times did we need to see Gunsmoke? How was it even on every time we visited? I know the 80's didn't have a Gunsmoke channel). I crossed my fingers for that cartoon donkey and Roni Stoneman. Hee Haw was the ****—the music was better, it was way more fun, and again, Roni Stoneman. As for imagining ourselves in the program, let’s keep the barn, ditch the cornfields, and add Mid-Atlantic flora (major portions of this episode were recorded recently in the foothills of the Appalachians, Northern Virginia), so a lot of red maples, tulip poplars, and white oaks would be hanging over the red barn of our soundscape. We’ll sit and listen to the trees and ghostly echoes of long-ago music. Because, like Hee Haw, we have a musical guest this week! We’re calling legendary Virginian fiddler Henry Reed out of the public domain. And I feel like we should quickly parse “legendary.” So Henry Reed was a musical sponge; he had a massive amount of songs stored in his head. A folklorist brought a microphone to the guy in the 60s and pressed record. Had the folklorist not shown up with a recorder, Reed's mastery of so many forgotten melodies would have disappeared with him. Think of a future without recording devices—there might be one person left who knows "Oops, I Did it Again" or "Mambo #5." Were that person to depart (kick the bucket), so would the knowledge of those songs. Reed specialized in traditional Appalachian fiddle music. The dude learned to play songs by ear, so he would hear it, learn it, play it. The music history that flowed through that dude's head—he picked up songs from so many other performers who brought their own mental library of different times, struggles, regions. He heard the music and stored them (many of those recordings make up the background textures of this week's episode). For more information on Henry Reed, check out the Library of Congress collection. And I should mention, the guy that recorded Reed was folklorist and fiddler, Alan Jabbour. A pretty special dude in his own right. (I also weaved in a bit of dialogue of Reed, Reed's wife Nettie, and Jabbour, so if you hear talking, that's them). And let’s end it there. Maybe allow some worries to dwindle today (especially if you have no capacity to fix them). Henry Reed did exactly that when he and his wife lost their home to fire in the 30's. Reed said, “Well, Nettie, we haven't lost everything, because we still have our health.” Take care, y’all.
