This weekend, my friend S. dragged me out to the country, in spite of my grouchy and anti-social end-of-semester funk, to see a bunch of local bands. I am quite happy that she succeeded in getting my cranky ass up off the couch, because we had a great time!

It’s the first time I have gone to see any local music on purpose since moving to New Wye — many times I’ve caught a local band or two at the bar when happy hour wound up lasting into the later parts of the evening, but in those cases the bands were just a noisy nuisance, too loud in a too-empty bar, preventing us from gossiping with the ease we ladies normally require.

This time, we drove out to the country (The country, people! Way out in that country!) to a little warehouse in the middle of nowhere. Well, they call it a warehouse, but basically it was a barn. There were lots of dogs, and the refreshments were a brown-bag affair. We brought some sangria, and other people were passing around cases of PBR and selling ribs out front. Like I said, country.

The music was really, really good, though. There was (in my opinion) an over-abundance of washboards, but there were also more useful traditional instruments, like mandolins, banjos, washtub basses, harmonicas, accordions, and many guitars.

Do I also need to mention the cute boys? Well, I guess I just mentioned them. I now have a raging crush on a washtub bass player who had his hair done up in a bun with chopsticks. Normally those three things (washtub bass! long hair! chopsticks in a bun!) would be mercilessly mocked by me, but let me tell you this dude was working it. My friend said his singing was “like a New Orleans ghost,” which strikes me as about right.

The whole evening was rather rejuvenating, in that way that happens whenever I find a local bar where no one is wearing khaki, or, say, when I see a person with a mohawk. These things lift my spirits. Needless to say, a whole barn full of weirdos getting down to hillbilly-punk music* pretty much made my week.

*Dude, I have no idea how to describe this music. I would just call it what the one band calls it, but it involves a description that’s a little too geographically specific for this anonymous blog. If you know me and are interested, email me and I’ll send you the band’s link.