Clay here, recounting an amazing weekend down at our favorite party thrown by our favorite dude down at our favorite little musical repair shop. We’d been looking forward to the Stidham Old Time Music Gathering all year – and, after a week and a half of air conditioning and fall-ish weather, my brain’s finally cooled down enough to write about it!
The Stidham Old Time Music Gathering is a home-grown old time music festival thrown the last weekend of July at James E. Webb Musical Sales & Repair down in Tomahawk, Kentucky. It’s organized by James L. Webb (we know him as Jim!), a skilled luthier, musician, and all-’round cool guy. You can read about him and his shop here. It’s actually directly thanks to Jim that we started performing as a band in the first place, but we’ll tell that story in a future blog post!
Though we’ve played at Jim’s shop loads of times, this was the first Stidham we’ve performed as a band! Like last year, Jim asked Anabel to be the emcee, so she and Violet headed down on Thursday. Friday morning, I picked up our friend Tori (Stidham volunteer and friend of the band) and we headed down Route 23, the Country Music Highway, to join the party. This was July 25, the day Tyler Childers’ Snipe Hunter released, so we were windows-down blasting it the whole drive (Bitin’ List and Watch Out are now at the top of my cover wishlist).
Both Anabel and Violet played alongside other acts during Friday’s set – Violet as a guest fiddler with the Ditch Lilies, and both Violet and Anabel with Phill Barnett and the Rockhouse Renegades.
Phill’s songs are catchy in the way that you only have to hear them once for them to worm their way into your head. I’d heard him perform some originals about a month earlier at the benefit concert for Appalachian Legacy and they hit so cleanly that catching them a second time here, they felt as familiar as if I’d been listening to them nonstop. All of them were good, but Chickenshit was probably my favorite.
“My favorite song was on Friday performed by the Ditch Lillies called Minerva. This song was written by Linda Jean Stokely, a person near and dear to both Tia and I!“
VIOLET
“Stidham was a whole lot of running around to see, hear, and be in the presence of some of the most kind and soulful people I’ll ever meet. It’s an honor to emcee, and I’ll do it till I can’t. Brian Mollett played a delightful version of Gillian Welch’s Winter’s Come and Gone. Gillian lovers rise!“
ANABEL
Kill Devil Hillbillies closed out the night with a killer set and an unplanned call-and-response with the sheep. They were vocal critters, and seemed to bleat more as the night went on.
Fast forward to Saturday, which started with the first of many delicious cups of cold brew chicory coffee I’d enjoy from Jim’s wife, Sarah Webb. (Thank you Sarah! It’s thanks to you and that big fan under the tent that I survived the weekend!)
Violet and Anabel taught workshops – beginning fiddle and beginning guitar, respectively. At 3:00, we took the stage with a set built around old time fiddle tunes – but with a few departures from the theme sprinkled in. Here’s a sampling!
(Fan moment! Our cover of “I Could Drive You Crazy” got autoflagged for copyright starting at 40 seconds in! Officially recognized as recognizable on YouTube, lol. It’s an honor, thank you.)
I don’t know if Jim planned it this way or if was sheer luck, but nearly every act on Saturday incorporated a mountain dulcimer. It was really delightful to get to hear all the different ways people were able to make it sing, capped off with some of the sweetest playing I’ve ever heard by Sarah Kate Morgan & Leo Shannon. They took the stage just as an evening thunderstorm passed by, successfully calling in every bit of electric magic from the air!
Old time music, I think, is space-based. There’s traditions rooted in place, certainly, with distinct styles and lineages across central Appalachia, or the Ozarks, or Owen County, but I see the heart of old time music most clearly in the shape of how it’s shared, the circle which is already whole and complete… yet still able to make room for another without breaking. Someone there has saved a seat for you. You gather, you play, you pause, you disperse… Then you gather again. It’s like breathing, like the way each new breath is both totally distinct and as familiar as the last. It’s always a new circle, but it’s always the same circle, too.
Jim, thank you for giving us the space to gather!
This Sunday, August 10, we’ll be playing music from 12-2 at Kentucky Native Cafe in Lexington. We’d love to see you there!
Violet and the Newsroom 
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