Our performance Saturday night was billed as part of the Dinner special in the Europa room, although by the time we played at 8:45 most of the dinner crowd had left. There were about half-a-dozen fellow musicians however, who came to see us. We had fun playing and did well except for a few word issues.
The definite high point of the festival for me was seeing The New Mules, a group from Illinois that plays mostly traditional music from Illinois. Much of their material is from the book Dear Old Illinois, co-written by New Mules Fiddler, Garry Harrison. The other fiddler is Garry's daughter Genevieve (Gena), so all the traditional tunes were played with (unison) double fiddles. Their instrumentals were just plain fun and I can see why they took first place in the traditional band competition at the Appalachian String Band Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia. Since I mostly sing, I also enjoyed their songs, most of which were sung by Gena.
I had read a review of Dear Old Illinois a while back in the Old Time Herald and in the last Dec-January OTH had an inteview with Garry Harrison. So I was plenty excited to see that they were coming to Minnesota and was really glad to hear them.
We also bought the New Mules CD as well as the book and accompanying CD for Dear Old Illinois. Since the festival, I've listened some and tried out some of the tunes in the book. Our contradance band, Danebodium, is rehearsing a couple of times this month and I've got a few tunes to try out - in addition, there's at least one song I'm trying to learn.
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