Chippoaks Performance Oct 20 Fall Harvest Festival

If you want to hear some ancient songs performed by a group of hard working young musicians come on out to Chippoaks on Saturday Oct 20. We will be doing two sets during the Fall Harvest Festival. Where else will you see young musicians passing around instruments and performing old Carter Family songs, a Woody Guthrie song or two, and even a great Steve Earle song? You might even hear a couple that Gram Parsons or Townes Van Zandt wrote. We will also have a formerly wild Corolla stallion along with us.

Chippoaks Plantation State Park in Surry Virginia--just across the ferry from Jamestown.

We Talked About Griots

Yesterday we had students from Rivermont School out at the horse lot. One of the boys had never been out before. After we worked horses for a while he surprised me by looking over at the banjo on the porch bench and asked me if I could teach him how to play it.

 We are in the year 2018 and this young African American teen looked over at America's most African American instrument and asked me if I could teach him how to play it.

We talked about the African roots of banjos. We talked about the history and development of banjos over the past few centuries. We talked abut three string banjos. We talked about wooden headed banjos. We talked about four string banjos and we talked about five string banjos.

We talked about oral tradition. We talked about the importance of rhythm and repetition  in making oral tradition easier to learn and pass down. We talked about the blues as an example of rhythm and repetition. We talked about Charlie Patton, Psalms, and the  poetry of the prophet Amos.

We talked about how Jimmy Rogers used that tradition and the courage that it took for him to compose and perform "TB Blues" at the very time that he was dying from the ravages of tuberculosis.

And we talked about the griot--the African keeper of the cultural tradition of his people--the walking library of history and tradition who taught and preached through the ancient songs that he helped preserve and carry on.

And we talked about the African concept of  "Sankofa" --reaching back into history to bring forward the wisdom of the past.

And later I could not help but pause and consider what had happened.  How many times--how many thousands upon thousands of times, has a young black man looked at the face of an old man with a banjo and simply asked, "Could you teach me how to play that?"

And how many thousands upon thousands of times, both here and in Africa, has that simple question produced a discussion of history,culture, wisdom, art, beauty and connectedness.

In a time when our nation is divided more than it has been in at least fifty years and maybe one hundred and fifty years, few things are worth seeking more than connectedness--and "Sankofa."