Our air conditioning died. It was old and probably needed to be replaced anyway, but it’s still a pain when it happens. So this week Laura and I have been emptying the attic so that the installers have access to the air handler and the ducts so that these can be re-insulated. During this process we found tons of stuff we had completely forgotten about, most of which we’re just tossing or sending to Goodwill. Among these items we discovered an unusual musical instrument, one that I had never been able to identify…until now.
Category: Music
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It was another one of those weekends where everything was happening at the same time. It’s a Chorale concert weekend, downtown was hosting the Reedy River Race as well as the March for Science. There was baseball, festivals in just about every small surrounding town, and more than one individual could take in. Yet, we managed to squeeze in quite a bit of it in one day.
I was intrigued by this idea of a Beer and Hymns event. When I found one in Columbia I sent a note to my friend Dwight saying that he and his wife Sue should check it out. He responded that there was already such a thing in Greenville. After doing some digging, I found Hymns and Hops would be holding its next event at What’s on Tap, a bar on Woodruff Road. I contacted my partner in this endeavor, Don Kirkindoll, and we made arrangements to attend.
Say the words “drinking songs” and what pops to mind is probably a group of swaying revelers, mugs in hand, slurring away off-key in an Irish pub or German biergarten. Asked to name a drinking song, most could probably only come up with “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Lately, though, a new phenomenon seems to be popping up – drinking beer while singing hymns. Sounds kind of strange, a bit sacrilegious, and right up my alley.
Have I mentioned how jam-packed crazy this past weekend has been? Friday I accompanied Glynda to Prosperity where we closed on the sale of the second home in my parents’ estate, then celebrated with dinner downtown. Saturday I spend the day exploring York County with Alan, and early Sunday morning I attended SC Comicon with Chip and his family. Yet, Sunday wasn’t over. I left straight from Comicon and headed downtown for the Our World Festival.
NOTE: I started writing this post a couple of years ago and for whatever reason never finished it. After this past weekend’s William Walker Singing I decided it was time to dig it back out.
After my disasterous attempts at leading a couple of songs at the Sacred Harp singing at First Christian Church last Friday (back in 2015, when I first started this post) I decided that I needed to familiarize myself a bit more with the material. I put together a method for studying, and came up with a simple, mobile solution for having my favorite tunes on hand. In the process, I also stumbled on a community obsessed with record-keeping, more so than just about any obsessive sports fan I’ve ever encountered.
I almost missed it. A friend had posted on Facebook that he was attending the William Walker Memorial Shape Note Singing and that it would be this weekend. My original plans for the weekend had been changed, so I thought it would be a good chance to head over there. It had been awhile since I’d been to one of these singings, longer than I had thought, as it turned out.
While I’ve been able to find several venues where I can play my banjo, finding a venue for the new drum has been a bit more problematic. We weren’t able to find a drum circle while we were down in Florida, so I looked for options in Greenville. A friend online mentioned the Greenville Unitarian Universalist Church. But, of course they would have one. It wasn’t exactly a circle, but it was interesting.








