A Keltricity Christmas is Coming to Town

It is with profound hesitation that I write and publish this post. We each have our favorite secrets. This is one of mine.

Keltricity is a treasure, a local musical group that regularly plays Celtic and related music, here in Louisville and other locations. 

Do you ever get that feeling of déjà vu? That’s what I have when I hear Keltricity play. There is a familiarity in the music--as if I know the sounds in my bones. Not so much in this lifetime, as I don’t trace my ancestry to Celtic roots. But then who really knows? Or perhaps, to quote another musician, Bob Dylan, “T’was in another lifetime…”

Henry Austin (guitar and vocals), Laurel Fuson (accordion), Joe Burch (mandolin) and Jannell Canerday (fiddle and vocals) blend a unique sound in their performances of  traditional Irish and Scottish music, songs from Cape Breton and French Canada, along with Cajun and newer Celtic music.  

You can hear the roots of bluegrass and country in a lot of the songs Keltricity performs, from the sweet and sad, “High on the Mountains”, the melancholy “Oh, the Dreadful Wind and Rain”, the romantic “Galway Girl”, to the lively Contra Dance tunes and Irish polkas. The last category I didn’t know existed until I found myself toe-tapping along.

Keltricity can be heard generally on at least one Friday night a month at The Bard’s Town, where you can listen, drink and enjoy better-than-average pub food. It’s great entertainment and a lovely evening. And would be a bargain at twice the $5 suggested cover or whatever contribution you feel inspired when the hat is passed between sets. 

Keltricity also plays at Contra Dances and recently performed at the Grand Ball for the Jane Austen Festival at The Galt House in Louisville. This year, as in past ones, they also were one of the bands at the Louisville Irish Festival at Bellarmine University.

As wonderful as this musical group is at any of these venues, something magical happens when they perform their very old-fashioned Christmas concert. This year it will be at the Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church across from Holiday Manor.

Here are some of Keltricity’s upcoming dates:

Cincinnati Contra Dancers, November 14

The Bard’s Town, November 20

Yule Y’All in Cincinnati, December 5, and

Yule Y’All in Louisville, December 12.

You can get more information online at http://www.keltricity.com/.

I wouldn’t have posted this blog if I minded your knowing about Keltricity and how good they are. But, please, don’t buy up all the tickets before I get mine.

Gauthier and Gilkyson: A Treat Not a Trick

There must be some meaning in which songs are still with you several days after a concert. On Halloween evening we heard Mary Gauthier (Pronounced: GO SHAY) and Eliza Gilkyson at the theater at Kentucky Country Day School.  The wonderful acoustics of the theater, the easy informality of the two singers and songwriters, as well as the comfortable surroundings gave us a feeling we were listening to two old friends singing in their living room to a group of friends.

Several days later I can still hear Gauthier’s warm voice in my head, no iPod necessary, singing “Mercy Now”. And Gilkyson’s there too, particularly singing the haunting song, “Greenfields”, written by her father, Terry Gilkyson. 

That song was made more poignant by her description of her conversation with her father about the song. She explained she had been putting together an album with music that had an environmental meaning. She told her father she thought “Greenfields” was the perfect metaphor for man’s callous relationship to Mother Earth. Her father’s response was: stop looking for hidden meaning. Instead, Terry Gilkyson said “Greenfields” was about Eliza’s mother who had been the love of his life but then left him. So much for hidden meanings.

Mary Gauthier and Eliza Gilkyson, engaging in gentle patter about songs and songwriting, and for the most part taking turns, sang lots of other memorable songs. Highlights included Gauthier on “Last of the Hobo Kings” and her particularly impeccable timing on “I Drink”.

Despite both women talking about how much easier it is to write a song about a break-up than about a happy romance, Gilkyson sang several happy songs, including “Roses at the End of the Day” and “Beauty Way”. She also performed a memorable song, “Jedediah 1777” so named for her eighth-generation ancestor, crediting a treasure trove of his letters written at Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War as the basis for most of the lyrics.  

Gauthier and Gilkyson closed with “Touchstone”, asking the audience to join in as they converted Pete Seeger’s last name into a verb. On an encore, they “Seeger’ed" the audience once again into singing along on Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.”

I’m still riding high from the concert. Hope you are too from whatever songs are swirling in your head.

Dylan As Today's Prophet

The last two nights I heard a prophet.  I was not in Vatican City, watching a TV evangelical program or attending one of the many “Six Flags over Jesus” churches. 

I was following Bob Dylan.  On 8/1/11, he performed on the same stage at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville where fifty years earlier Hank Williams had sung.  The next night Dylan played the Roberts Stadium in Evansville, Indiana. 

Dylan’s song writing is so prolific he could not have performed more than a small percentage of his songs on any night.  Many other examples of the prophetic and religious nature of his music could be given.

To name just a few, Dylan’s 1962 “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” describes the heart-rending 8/2/11 N Y Times photo of a starving child in Mogadishu. 

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number

Are there better words to describe half a million children who are on the verge of starvation in Somalia?

…how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died? “Blowin’ in the Wind”, 1962.

It’s not hard to match a current news story, for example, “Reaping Millions From Medicaid In Nonprofit Care for Disabled”, 8/2/11 NY Times, (Phil and Joel Levy taking $1 million a year each for running a Medicaid “nonprofit” for the disabled) to even an old Dylan song:

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth  “All Along the Watchtower” from 1968.

From Dylan’s 1980’s religious era the extent to which the traditional religious sector fails to provide guidance in modern times sounds if it were from the Bible.

Ring them bells Sweet Martha
For the poor man’s son
Ring them bells so the world will know
That God is one
Oh the shepherd is asleep
Where the willows weep
And the mountains are filled
With lost sheep  Ring Them Bells, 1989

The summer‘s record-breaking heat and drought in some parts of the country with floods destroying other parts brings a more recent song to mind:

Tryin’ To Get to Heaven, 1997.

The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before
I’ve been walking through the middle of nowhere
Trying to get to heaven before they close the door

Blowing his harmonica as sweetly as Gabriel must have blown his horn Dylan still regularly performs the music that enraptured a young generation of baby-boomers.  It’s no surprise that at both locations large crowds of gray-haired men and women, students and children stood, cheered and clapped for the 70 year old singer and songwriter whose words are as meaningful today as they ever were. 

Listening to Bob Dylan is more likely to get me to heaven than going to church.  Call me a blasphemer and heretic.  I will be in good company.