Barely Bluegrass 2003

This video celebrates the 9th annual Shippy Hollow tradition known around here simply as “Bluegrass”. The Columbia Gorge Bluegrass Festival happens every July here in Stevenson. The festival itself lasts 4 days, but the 2003 Shippy Hollow party lasted about 3 weeks. Or 13 minutes in video years. Yes, this one is epic: 200+ photos will hopefully seem to fly by and I wrote and recorded 8 new tunes for this video as well. I hope you can stay for the whole show, as there are some surprises here and there. And perhaps not a surprise is the fact that we’ve all aged in 16 years; some of us more than others. And of course, a few of the revelers aged themselves right off this mortal coil. RIP to them - they know who they are.

I truly hope you enjoy this one…

Some (perhaps) interesting notes… Belle is the Border Collie and she was 9 years old in this video. Smokey is the stray cat who had begun to hang out at the Hollow earlier in the year. He wanted in so badly (and finally got his wish later in the year when he almost died and officially became “our” cat). That is a story for another video. As I worked on this video, the PNW experienced a late season snow storm. In Stevenson, we were deluged with feet of snow – and as a matter of fact – it is currently snowing.

Liner Notes: These pics were taken with my first digital camera. Combine a really crappy camera with a pictographer who drank more than his share during these three weeks and, well, you’ll see… I can’t play bluegrass music (especially on a keyboard), so I didn’t try. Although some of these tunes approach bluegrass, I would tend to call the genre: Americana. Oh – there is one glaring exception. You can’t miss it…

If you were tickled by this show, there is another Bluegrass video on this site. If you’d like to check it out, click here.