Happy Thanksgiving! This week we celebrate something-or-other that happened on Plymouth Rock in such-and-such a year (and they say history isn’t being taught well enough in our schools!), the existence of the domesticated turkey, and the growers of cranberries (also somewhere near Plymouth Rock).
We’re also thankful for family, at least for the first 30 minutes, even the uncle who wants to rant about COVID and the last election, because fortunately he’s in the next room with a door that can be subtly closed.
Those of us involved in the bluegrass business have plenty to be thankful for, though they’re often things the wider world wouldn’t understand.
Do you have the family member who delivers the overly long and overly specific pre-meal grace?(“Father we’re just so thankful that Teresa’s plantar’s warts have finally healed). Here is a possible bluegrass musician’s Thanksgiving prayer in that style:
Heavenly Father, we’re thankful to be back on the road, even if the travel itself is still exactly as tedious as we thought it was prior to COVID. We’re grateful for good festival time slots this year, with only one post-supper break set, one 8:00 a.m. gospel set, and only one following Little Roy & Lizzie. We’re thankful for fewer food poisoning incidents this year on the road. We’re grateful for our banjo player’s new tuner, which actually works. We’re thankful that our band is still together, due in part to our longtime fiddle player finally becoming more passive than aggressive, and we’re grateful for the medication that made that possible. We rejoice for surprisingly good CD sales to people who no longer own working CD players. We feel blessed by the recent chart success of our original song, Bluegrass Music, Yes We Love It. We’re thankful that our bass player’s wife Sharon does such a good job maintaining our very user-friendly web site (we love how easily the pages load!). We feel blessed that the Bill Monroe Decca material can now be streamed, even if we already own the 1950-58 boxed set. And Lord, we thank you for our lead singer and band leader, who, in spite of the giant ego, does a really good job singing Hey Hey Bartender, and takes responsibility for things so we have someone to blame. We ask that you bless this turkey.
Amen.
