Violet and the Newsroom

(Let me out or I’ll break out, fare ye well my darlin’!)

Clay here! We’re all a bit busy this week (work! travel! fall break! and much more!) so this’ll be a shorter blog post. Still, we wanted to celebrate our weekend and let you know what we’ve been up to!

Saturday was a big day for us – back-to-back gigs, an hour’s drive away from each other. From noon-2pm, we played at Liberty Hall for their Garden Gathering. This was our third time playing at Liberty Hall, and our second time playing for Liberty Hall (since last time we were here, we were playing for First Presbyterian Church) and we plan to come back any chance we can get!

Liberty Hall is an 18th century home built for the Brown family, one of Frankfort (and Kentucky’s) prominent families of the time. John Brown was an early statesman, serving as a representative of Virginia in Congress when he introduced the bill which would make Kentucky its own state.

John’s wife Margaretta was a philantropist and an avid reader and letter-writer. Her correspondence concerned matters of politics and religion. She read early works on women’s rights and opened the first Sunday School west of the Allegheny mountains.

The house is built from bricks dug from the property itself. Though Liberty Hall’s garden sits right up against the Kentucky River, the building did not flood when it crested at over 48 feet earlier this year. It also did not flood during record-making and record-breaking floods of 1937 or 1978 (when much of the rest of the downtown was underwater). Was it good luck or canny planning to place it there, long before the floodwalls, river channelization, or installation of the dams and locks raised the river to its present height?

Oh!!! And it’s HAUNTED! Go take a tour!

(Right, right, the show!)

It was great! We’re grateful to Sam for inviting us back, and for the whole crew at Liberty Hall for being hospitable, as always. The stage was thoughtfully shaded the whole time by a magnificently tall tree, and the food truck stayed open an extra 30 minutes for us so we could eat after we were done (thank you Yummy Tacos And More)!

We’ve been opening sets recently with some fun tunes in D-minor – with my dulcimer tuned to DAG and Violet’s fiddle sitting in some magical cross-tuning. If you’ve heard us play Cuckoo before (but not in the past month or so) you’d have heard us do a dulcimer opening. Well, Violet’s whipped up a fresh fiddle opening that helps the show start strong – give it a listen!

Here’s a selection of some of the tunes we played!

The Cuckoo -> Ain’t No Grave

Plastic Jesus

Angel From Montgomery (feat. Laura Ellen Penn, who popped up to sing with us on the last verse!)

Cluck Ol’ Hen

When You See Those Flying Saucers

Wild Mountain Thyme

So, after that set was over, we meandered on down to Chasers in Lebanon! We got to see a familiar face from our very first show in Frankfort – Sarah – who we met back at Ama on the Creek’s Appalachian Legacy benefit in July. She told her brother Walt about us, and he invited us down to his bar in Lebanon to celebrate Marion County Country Ham Days.

(Ham Days garners a crowd of about 30,000 – which is BONKERS huge, especially considering it is held concurrently with World Chicken Festival in London, Kentucky. Big weekend!)

We’re so grateful for Sarah and Walt for inviting us over, and we enjoyed getting to spend a special evening with a great, attentive crowd. Thanks to all who popped in (and we’d love to come back sometime)!

Walt also featured us on a banner? SO COOL. THANK YOU, THANK YOU!

(And, Walt, thank you also for the expert maneuvering and traffic direction while we were trying to leave. Ham Days was really picking up when we were heading out, and we wouldn’t have made it without you!)

UPCOMING

Nothing this weekend, but the weekend after that is Liz’s Celebration of Life. If you knew her – if you ever played with her at jams in Frankfort, Lexington, or Elsewhere – come down to First Christian Church in Frankfort on October 11th at noon. There will be a jam in the church gymnasium.

And then, after that, we have another big weekend! More details on the way soon, but on Friday, October 17, we’ll be performing a show with Lucy and the Love Letters at Rebel Rebel in Berea. Saturday, October 18 we’ll be at the Appa-Latch-Uh Hippie Festival at the Bell County Fairgrounds (we’re playing from 7-9)! (And thank you to Heather for the invite!)

See you shortly!

Love, Clay!