Old Fiddler's Week on August, 2024: whats something embarrassing that happened to you?

Old Fiddler's Week 2024. The Meese fight back against electric bass : Bluegrass Today Galax Old Fiddlers Convention

whats something embarrassing that happened to you?

In a German lesson, we had to think of something begining with 'G', and all the obvious words had been said since I was last on the roll call, I was struggling to think of one - but then I remembered 'gummi'. Our old teacher had taught us it meant 'eraser', so i thought it;d be an okay thing to say for my turn. I said it, and no one laughed because like i said - we'd all been taught by our previous teacher that it meant 'eraser'. Then, the new lady teaching us goes 'Um well i guess you could have that one' and everyone is all 'what's up with it? it just means eraser'. and then she went ' actually it can also mean condom'.

Well that was it then, everyone started laughing, and for weeks people were shouting condom at me in the halls.

This didn't happen to me, but it kind of involved me - my friend, back when we were 15, hit on this guy at school. He looked around our age, so she asked him out. He was quite cute and he said yes, so they began dating. A few days later - we find out he's only 11. We had no idea- he was really tall for his age and pretty athletic. My friend see's nothing wrong with it - age is just a number to her and they looked like a couple the same age so it didnt look weird or anything...but then his class found out. So basically, me and my friend were walking around at lunch, and all these laughing 11 year olds were shouting 'Kiddy fiddler' at us, like it was the funniest thing in the world. That was bad enough...but it got worse. This guys mother found out he was:

A) dating, and

B) dating a 15 year old.

She went absolutely ballistic. And then it got worse again: she broke up on the phone with my friend on behalf of her son!!! she wouldnt let him do it himself! The whole school found out, and this time at lunch, not only did we have 11 year olds shouting 'child catcher' at us, we also had tons of teasing about the phone thing. And the guy got made into a laughing stock - and kind of still is, I dont think his class mates have let him forget about it. This whole thing went on for about a month - so really it was a month of embarrassing events ><

has anybody ever heard of the knoxvillegrass band?

has anybody ever heard of the knoxvillegrass band?

Yeah...I have informations about that.

With bluegrass, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Many new to East Tennessee—and even some natives—assume that bluegrass is our native idiom, the music our ancestors listened to. It's good ole string-band music, and they imagine the Scots-Irish mountaineers adapting Irish jigs and reels on mountainside cabins and calling it bluegrass.

But then they learn more about it, and bluegrass begins to seem as foreign as Wildcats basketball or pari-mutuel betting. Bluegrass, as defined (often very strictly), is hardly 60 years old. Its acknowledged progenitor, the late mandolinist Bill Monroe, was from Western Kentucky, hundreds of miles from here. He refined the form in Nashville, and seldom played in the Knoxville area. His original Blue Grass Boys, named for the motto of Monroe's home state, were from all over the South—but none were from East Tennessee or even, strictly speaking, from the Southern Appalachian region.

It's not surprising that some cynics have claimed Knoxville has nothing to do with bluegrass, and no right to claim its heritage.

However, dig a little deeper still, and you may come away with another perspective. Fiddle-driven string bands, playing songs that would later be adapted for bluegrass, were a big deal here deep into the 19th century. Even if it wasn't the souped-up, disciplined version Monroe would later espouse, guitar-fiddle-mandolin groups like the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, a black Knoxville band of the '20s and early '30s, were playing a fast, blues-influenced string-band music.

Moreover, Knoxville even has connections to that seminal band, the Blue Grass Boys. In creating a new music, Monroe was strongly influenced by his original band, in particular three talented and idiosyncratic string-band musicians.

The original Blue Grass Boys included Floridian fiddler Chubby Wise; Middle Tennessee guitarist Lester Flatt; and the youngest member, tarheel prodigy Earl Scruggs. Scruggs played banjo, an instrument which had done service in rhythm sections for early jazz bands and some country bands, but he played it much differently from earlier country banjoists like Uncle Dave Macon. He didn't strum, but plucked the strings in a three-finger style, improvising riffs, something like a bebop soloist might. Some critics claim bluegrass was born the day in 1945 that Scruggs joined Monroe's band.

Earl Scruggs began his performing career a few months before that, in Knoxville. As he related to WDVX's Tony Lawson in a radio interview earlier this year, Scruggs joined the local band of fiddler 'Lost John' Miller in early 1945. They played in Knoxville during the week, occasionally traveling to Nashville for Saturday radio shows. There Scruggs met fellow tarheel Jim Shumate, a Monroe-band fiddler who Scruggs says "had heard of my picking," and tried to recruit the banjoist. Scruggs first resisted, but some months later, when Miller dissolved the band, Scruggs headed to Nashville, where he joined Monroe's Blue Grass Boys.

Knoxville was then known for two radio stations which featured live country shows: WNOX and its famous daily live-audience show "Mid Day Merry Go Round" didn't have as much to do with bluegrass as did the competing station, WROL. Grocer and opportunistic promoter Cas Walker knew a good thing when he saw it: "If you have what I call jumping up and down music," he said of bluegrass, "something that a child can jump up and down to, you make the children jump up and down and listen to you, and when you please someone's child, you please the mama and papa." Walker's advertising supported WROL's bluegrass shows, and Walker became a de facto patron of bluegrass.

According to Charles K. Wolfe in the country-music history Tennessee Strings, WROL launched a "Who's Who of early bluegrass," especially those bands whose last name was Brothers: Brewster Brothers, Cope Brothers, Webster Brothers, Osborne Brothers, Bailey Brothers, some of whom rivaled Monroe's band in popularity and musicianship. The phenomenon blossomed so rapidly that some scholars are convinced bluegrass might have happened naturally, even if Monroe's band had not been there to kick it off.

Flatt and Scruggs quit Monroe's band at its peak, around 1948. In a rare reversal of the prescribed course for successful country musicians, they left Nashville and headed east. According to Wolfe, Flatt and Scruggs "returned to East Tennessee, where their music found an even more congenial reception." They gave the band an appropriate name for their new home base: the Foggy Mountain Boys. Scruggs recalls they played on WROL, especially a show featuring comedian Archie Campbell called "Dinner Bell." "Lester and I stayed a pretty good while there on WROL," Scruggs recalls.

They were also, for a time, a fixture at WCYB in Bristol. Though Monroe stayed with the Opry, "the main thrust of bluegrass music remained in East Tennessee, in Virginia, and in North Carolina," according to Wolfe.

One of the brother bands who arrived in Knoxville a little later were the Louvin Brothers: not strictly a bluegrass band, they nonetheless popularized an older song which raised Knoxville's bluegrass visibility: the bizarre murder ballad "Knoxville Girl," which was destined to become a bluegrass standard. A later bluegrass standard with Knoxville roots is called "Rocky Top." Written in the 1960s and later incorporated into UT Vols tradition, that song alone has made it possible for some bluegrass bands to make a living in Knoxville; a bluegrass band, on a home-game day, may earn as much as $1,500—that is, if they can put up with repeated requests for "Rocky Top."

"This is the heart of bluegrass country," says music scholar Brent Cantrell, the Middle-Tennessee-raised director of Jubilee Community Arts. "Knoxville can claim as much as anybody to be at the center of the bluegrass phenomenon."

While some musicians kept playing it faithfully, the crowds ebbed and flowed with national trends, sometimes with unpredictable inspirations. When a strange combination of folk-music revival and "The Beverly Hillbillies", with its annual cameos by Flatt and Scruggs—plus that duo's slightly anachronistic score for the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde—revived national interest in bluegrass, interest in bluegrass swelled here. By the 1970s, the band Knoxville Grass, a local bluegrass band which earned some national recognition, was getting around—with Paul Brewster, of one of East Tennessee's first families of bluegrass, on vocals—and something peculiar was happening in Bearden. Phil Leadbetter remembers it well. Next door to Pick 'n' Grin Music was a little bitty restaurant that sold barbecue. Lynn Norman of Knoxville Grass talked Buddy Smothers into promoting his restaurant with live bluegrass.

The number of musicians who played at Buddy's is, in retrospect, astonishing: Ricky Scaggs, Jerry Douglas, Bela Fleck, Keith Whitley. Doyle Lawson, one of the traditional bluegrass gods today, played his own band's first public show there. Each of them could pack a large theater today. Moreover, Buddy's attracted hundreds of fans every Friday and Saturday night. Leadbetter says he still meets national performers who got to know Knoxville via Buddy's Bar-b-q .

At the same time, WIVK was sponsoring bluegrass-appreciation concerts, and several nightclubs like Britt's on Cumberland Avenue and elsewhere specialized in bluegrass acts, as Maryville kept it pumping with the Down Yonder Saloon. "Knoxville was a place where every band passing through always wanted to come through and get dates," Leadbetter says.

Bluegrass got so big that at one point, Mayor Randy Tyree proclaimed Knoxville "Bluegrass Music City." Don Cassell, the guitarist/mandolinist then based in Chattanooga, looked forward to his visits to Knoxville. "It was a hotbed for music," he says. "There was so much happening here."

It all seemed to culminate in the World's Fair, which celebrated bluegrass with many survivors of its original era, like mandolinist Red Rector.

By the mid-'80s, the bluegrass was drying up. Buddy's, expanding its empire, dropped bluegrass, and so did WIVK. Bluegrass clubs were harder to find. "It seemed like everything died," says Leadbetter, though his own career thrived, as he got a berth in J.D. Crowe's major bluegrass band, and earned a Grammy nomination.

Bluegrass didn't die, completely. As WIVK rejected bluegrass for more Nashville styles, public radio shows like WUOT's "Music of the Southern Mountains," hosted by bluegrass aficionado Paul Campbell, and institutions like Jubilee Community Arts kept the patient fan supplied with rations of bluegrass. And local bluegrass bands could always make a living playing "Rocky Top" on fall Saturdays.

In 1996, Tony Lawson and associates founded public-radio station WDVX, a station with probably a heavier diet of bluegrass than even WROL in its heyday.

O Brother Where Art Thou and other influence jump-started a national mania for bluegrass. Equipped with earnest broadcasters and record merchants, Knoxville was peculiarly well positioned to take advantage.

It's a blue grass band

What is this serial killers name?!??!?!!?

What is this serial killers name?!??!?!!?

The Bega schoolgirl murders refers to the abduction, rape and murder of New South Wales schoolgirls, 14-year-old Lauren Margaret Barry and 16-year-old Nichole Emma Collins of Bega, New South Wales on 6 October 1997.[1]

The girls were abducted by Leslie Camilleri and Lindsay Beckett, both from the town of Yass on the outskirts of Canberra, ACT. The men subjected the girls to repeated rapes and sexual assaults on five or more separate occasions, while driving them to remote locations throughout rural New South Wales and Victoria.[2] Over a twelve-hour period the girls had been driven several hundred kilometres from Bega, New South Wales, to Fiddler's Green Creek in Victoria, where they were stabbed to death by Beckett under the order of Camilleri.

The girls were reported missing on the day of their disappearance, and a massive manhunt consisting of family, friends, police and members of the Bega community combed the area but failed to locate any sign of the missing girls.[2] Police investigations lasting several weeks eventually led to Camilleri and Beckett, career criminals with over 200 criminal convictions between them.[3] Camilleri, who claimed he was innocent of any crime and insisted Beckett acted alone, was facing existing charges relating to other sexual assaults against minors at the time of the schoolgirl murders.[

Holidays also on this date Thursday, August 1, 2024...