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Bluegrass Back Where It Belongs
It was a strange scene last weekend, one we’re not used to seeing in downtown Knoxville. Everywhere you looked, there were people. And they all seemed to be having fun. The combination of the Dogwood Arts Festival and the Rossini Italian Street Festival brought thousands to the place some people (not us) have been declaring dead for a long time.
It was the best Dogwood Festival we’ve seen in years. We’ve given the Dogwood folks plenty of grief in the past, so this year we’d like to say good job.
But perhaps the best music was created during the Sunday afternoon bluegrass competition, which hadn’t been part of the Dogwood Festival for a few years. “I think it surprised the people that turned us loose with it, with the amount of people that showed up out there and stayed to the very end,” says Freddy Smith, morning DJ at WDVX, which sponsored the competition. “The bluegrass audience is really passionate about the music.
“They did this as an experiment to try it, and before we got half way through the event they came over and said, ‘We’ll do this again next year,’” Smith adds.
Dogwood Arts Festival director Ed Pasley was certainly pleased. “The talent of the musicians and the enthusiasm of the crowd made for a great Sunday afternoon in downtown Knoxville,” he says.
Ten bands competed in the group event, most of them coming from East Tennessee, with a few from Kentucky and Virginia. The prize went to One Way Track, a band from the Cumberland Gap area, Smith says. Second went to New Union Grass, and third to Shadow Ridge.
What Knoxville needs now is a kick-ass fall festival. Anyone?
On The Bus We Go
RB Morris has a new book of poetry, Littoral Zone. He read selections of it in between songs at his show with Hector Qirko two weeks ago at the Laurel Theater.
RB is fond of deriding the power of poetry in this day and age, and perhaps he’s right. But listening to his work, I was reminded how vivid and powerful poetry could be. Littoral Zone includes new material as well as stuff published in the Hard Knoxville Review, a sporadic paper published by Morris and artist Eric Sublett (whose painting series the title comes from) in the ’80s.
You can hear for yourself at Market Square Booksellers on Wednesday, April 28, from 5 to 8 p.m., when Morris will read selections and sign books.
Here’s a sample, lifted from the end of an untitled prose piece about the downtown lunch crowd, caught in a sudden storm:
The street preacher who held steady and oblivious in his public query was now himself drawn to pause watching the herd darting and rushing about with newspapers and pocketbooks above their heads, toppling chairs and bumping into one another. A few poor rain dogs hang-dogged and befuddled seeing the masters bolting about them. Now the psalmist too, whose voice every patron had passed by that hour and shunned as it were his weary message, caught up his breath and beheld the unraveling of the mighty scene before him. He lifted his eyes to that unlikely sky, the wondrous rapture of natural forces, this miracle of sun and rain, and looked upon it.
Then in a voice that was a stranger even unto himself, he was crying out, The Devil is beating his wife! The Devil is beating his wife! The Devil is beating his wife!
Amazingly, for once, some did believe.
Go.
Thursday: Tonight you can dance to the Wailers in Market Square for free. Don’t bogart! If you’re not too tired afterwards, check out Old Time Relijun at the Pilot Light.
Friday: Music at the 11th Street Expresso House? Cool. Tonight hear Crash Addict and Almost Yesterday.
Saturday: If you have Leslie Woods’ new album, you know what an amazing songwriter and musician she is. See her with Amphigory at the Urban Cafe for the bargain price of $2.
Sunday: There’s a lot of great music being performed in Knoxville’s nooks and crannies. Like violinist Kenta Matsumi and pianist Seiko Miyamoto at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.
Monday: A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it. A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
Tuesday: The legendary Hank Jones plays with the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra at the Bijou.
Wednesday: Go hear RB. Then check out The American Plague, one of Knoxville’s hottest bands, opening for Lo-Pro and Thornley at Blue Cats.
—Joe Tarr, Benny Smith
April 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 17
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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