Saturday, March 10, 2018

OLD-TIME MUSIC: Songs from the range

As frequent readers know, the Dear Partner and I attend a lot of concerts, but I can truthfully say that until Friday's show by Martha Burns I had never heard a song about food poisoning.
It was called "Some Little Bug Is Going to Find You Someday," and despite the subject matter it was hilarious, with fatalist lyrics like: "Every microbe and bacillus has a different way to kill us, and in time they always claim us for their own" and "There are germs of every kind in any food that you can find, in the market or upon the bill of fare."
Another of her songs was "Get Along, Little Dogies," and she introduced it by saying that a lot of people think that "dogies" refers to dogs rather than cattle. She mused about the difficulty of herding poodles or Pomeranians.
In the second half of the show, Bob Bovee took the stage with his guitar, harmonicas (plural) and autoharp. He played mostly cowboy songs, full of images of cattle round-ups, stampedes, campfires, buffalo and mountains. He told some pretty funny jokes and did a mean yodel, too.
The concert was part of the Brandywine Friends of Old Time Music's series, held at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Newark, Del. There's no better indication of the casual, laidback atmosphere of these shows than the fact that we parked next to Bob Bovee; no limos and bodyguards here! His vehicle had Minnesota tags and a bumper sticker that read: "78 rpm. It's a speed we can live with."

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