Anna and Elizabeth's story songs

Anna behind the crankie, Elizabeth singing on the right.

My newest radio story is a non-narrated piece about the 25-year-old, old time musicians Elizabeth LaPrelle and Anna Roberts-Gevalt.  It aired on The Story with Dick Gordon on April 30, and on May 9 it aired on WMMT mountain community radio. How I heard about these women is a long story, and I've written it below. You can listen to the piece here:

Williams Island is on the right. Photo taken from a canoe in the (Tennessee) River.

Two or three summers ago there was a potluck dinner on Williams Island Farm. It began in the afternoon, a fire in the stone-circled ring with a dutch oven shoved in the coals, cooking some part of somebody's animal. There were a couple fiddles and a banjo. Later on, after whiskey, beer, moonshine, I'm sure, and a good meal, it was dark and the fire was still burning and sending up embers and I sang a ballad or two and there was more fiddle music. The night ended when we canoed back across the Tennessee River, Charlie Hunter's fiddle serenading us, the music bouncing off the rock face beneath the Baylor side. It was a lovely night, and that evening someone first told me about Elizabeth LaPrelle, the ballad singer.

Here & There: Thoughts from springtime

It has been getting greener by the minute here. One day, these vines did not exist, the next day, they were all over the telephone wires. Here are a few images from the past few weeks, from instagram.

 For some reason, I get hungry for egg salad when it gets warm out.

Pollen coated every surface of this neighborhood for days, until a rain shower washed it all away.

Cat got a mouse, left it on the doormat. (Notice the pollen?)

 

 A trip down to Charleston to see family. This was a wall in a restaurant.

And this was at a stall on Market Street.

 

Oh, and yesterday, I turned 26. Trae drove up for a lovely visit, but as always, it ended too soon!

Last hour in Charleston

A whirlwind of a weekend, zipping down to Charleston and back to see happy cousins, eat lots of seafood, and hunt for the perfect benne wafer with my grandparents. I'd never been before. I also never knew that my grandparents had eaten beaver tail (and liked it). It came up during breakfast, when we saw alligator on the menu (which they've also eaten, but did not like). The last hour I was there, I strolled around the battery.

And then I saw this:

Ocoee Lake

In 1911, the Tennessee Power Company dammed the Ocoee River east of Cleveland, TN, and created the state's first artificial lake.  TVA took over the company in 1939, and they've controlled the water level ever since. Nowadays, the river and lake are used mostly for recreation - the 1996 Olympic whitewater events were held there. (The whitewater center claims that it was the first Olympic whitewater event to be held on a natural river, but I'm not sure how natural it is if there's a dam controlling the flow.)  The day I happened to drive through the gorge, the water was extremely low - the dirt in the photo is the lakebed.

No water in Ocoee Lake, Sunday, March 9, 2013.

The average life expectancy of a dam is 50 years. The one that controls this lake is 101.