They rolled the cheese down Cooper's Hill last week. I bet there's a song about that somewhere.
If you don't know Cooper's Hill, hang on.
I've got a lot of music on my mind this week. When the spring foliage gets lush the music follows in festivals and concerts all over our region. There is no shortage of opportunities to hear somebody close by this summer. Might even be a neighbor.
When we have nothing else here, we'll have music. It flows like the streams out of our hollows. I sound like a broken record, but more great musicians--singers, songwriters, players and composers--come from a hundred mile circle around Pikeville than anywhere. Per capita, we're thick with musical people.
Or as I tell my friends out in Los Angeles, "You can't swing a cat without bonking a picker up side o' the head."
The interesting side of that is people around here can appreciate high end musicianship no matter where it comes from. There is an overlooked musical sophistication in the mountains we should take more advantage of.
With that in mind, the music series I work with over in Whitesburg opened with an all-female brass band from NYC last night with Elvis--or close facsimile thereof-- opening. Tonight Grammy winning Creole masters of Zydeco music with a pair of the best local mountain traditional musicians perform. Before the end of July there'll be genres representing music from across the world.
So you'll excuse me from being distracted by the music. There's a lot of different sounds swimming around my head and I've been looking for tunes to build a summer soundtrack.
Which gets me back to Cooper's Hill. It's in England, near Gloucester. They've been rolling the cheese down that hill around 200 years. For around 200 years, a wad of desparate individuals have chased that seven pound rolling wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down the hill with the first to the bottom it's recipient.
I say desperate because the particular hill is about 200 yards at 50% grade. As most of you mountain goats know, one doesn't doesn't run down a hill that steep unless being chased. Or drunk. Or maybe starving to death. A combination of gravity, momentum and your drunk legs ensures face plants and worse.
That cheese better be worth it, because that's all you'll get. If you win.
Watching the videos of this year's event got me thinking. Most obvious is we could do that here. We'd probably be pretty good at it, too. I just don't think we've got any cheese. So I kept thinking.
If there was a song to build enthusiasm around, maybe we could get somewhere. But as much as I look, I can find no songs about Cooper Hill and chasing rolling wheels of cheese.
I guess Chasing the Cheese may not be the best song title but you've got to admit a lot of what we're watching on the news these days can be summed up in one viewing of the Cooper Hill Cheese Chase.
Puts the rat race in a whole new light. There's gotta be a song there somewhere.