Great Weekend!

Wow! What a great weekend for my ongoing romance with old time music! I played so much this weekend that my calluses have calluses and my hand seems locked in a position that looks like grabbing a mandolin/ukulele/fiddle neck.

Things started well with a jam session Saturday afternoon at the Folk School of St. Louis, where we played a ton of tunes that don’t normally get played there. But the students were game and most of them, even the real new kids, did their best to pick up the new tunes and hang in with the dance tempos that were being played. It was definitely one of the best sessions I’ve been to at the school in months.

Then it was a quick 100 mile jaunt down to play a dance in Cape Girardeau with the Mound City Slickers. We stopped and had dinner together – loading up on pasta and salad to make sure we had plenty of energy to play those long dance tunes! The band played great! The small, but enthusiastic crowd of dancers seemed to love the music and have a real big time. I can’t wait to get down there again. Someone had a video camera and someone else was taking still photos of the band. If I can get hold of any of that, I'll post them here.

Another quick 100 mile drive back to St. Louis and we were able to stop by a party at our friend Michael B.’s where we jammed into the early morning with a fresh set of old time pickers.

Then I finished it all off on Sunday morning with the Hot Baloney Boys, playing our regular set at the Hartford Coffee Co. I don’t know if it was getting some new tunes into our set or what, but we seemed to play extra well, had fun, and got all coffee’d up into the bargain.

Though exhausting, it couldn’t have been a better weekend.