It’s a bright sunshiney day that belies the future threat of snow. It’s been in our forecast for a week, and looks like it plans to threaten us for another week ongoing. After last year, I’m sure everyone is figuring we can handle whatever the world chooses to throw at us, but at the moment I sure am enjoying the warm sunshine on my face.
Last night we played a house concert – which we rarely get to do. Susie of “Susie’s House Concert Series” brought us in to her beautiful home and shared her friends, her house, her food and her pug with us. We performed alongside an amazing musician from New Jersey – James Dalton is a good singer/songwriter, a great man-vocalist, and a truly jaw-droppingly spectacular harmonica player. He added a dimension to harp playing that I simply hadn’t heard before, especially considering the fact that he did most of his playing within the confines of a harmonica holder while playing guitar.
Playing with James Dalton at Susie’s House Concert in Gambrils, MD.
At the end of the night we joined him on a cover of “Stand By Me” and he joined us for our version of Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved”. He threw his vocal down with a ferocious honesty that I really admired and he was unafeared to play along with us, showing an intense proficiency with his weapons of choice, either mandolin or harmonica. He’s definitely a bluesman at heart and I hear he’s played with some of the best.
Unfortunately, I was aware of feeling a little out of sorts last night. Maybe it was a tricky night for me to do a house concert – I felt like I was trying to find some place to hide the whole night. A house concert’s a bad place to suddenly feel like you’re having a shy night, but man, I just wanted to hide in a corner and run sound, or play guitar from a corner. I enjoyed singing, I enjoyed telling stories and I think we had a great, personable night – psh – we were charming as Hell (if’n I do say so myself), but I wanted to curl up on the couch and listen to James and have my hair braided. Maybe something reminded me of the college coffeehouses I’d come up in, which were as much about retreating from the rest of the world as it was about the music.
Part of my brain was distracted by the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Watching all the political maneuvering that is being prefaced by statements of “this is not a political maneuver” just infuriates me. All the news people lapping it up. The careful stopwatches being well, watched, to see if it’s too soon to appear to be partisan, too soon to use this tragedy in some way, too late to appear wounded, too early to appear unaffected. NPR is talking about the state of our psychiatric and psychological support system in America. I keep thinking about our schools and our desire to find blame but our lack of stomach to solve the problem.
