Big Lick Bluegrass Festival - April 6 - 8, 2017: Preview

The fourteenth annual Big Lick Bluegrass Festival will run in Oakboro, NC from April 6 - 8, 2017 this year. Hosted this year by The Spinney Brothers, Big Lick is the kick-off outdoor festival for the North Carolina bluegrass season. A small festival held in a rural setting, it offers lots of jamming opportunities, strong national and regional bands, and a welcoming environment. Although the weather can get chilly this early in the season, people in this state where good bluegrass bands seem to sprout almost as thickly as the spring daffodils, there are plenty of people eager to get outside, to jam, show their stuff from an unusually varied and active Thursday open mic evening, and celebrate the coming of Spring. Promoter Jeff Branch has carefully built this small festival, bringing in national bands and finding strong local support. 

Jeff Branch

The Lineup

Open Mic

Big Lick features an unusually enjoyable open mic program on Thursday evening for early arrivals and campers coming to the festival. Some of the bands appearing have been scheduled while others are an organic growth from the pickers who have assembled in the field to jam. Such open mic programs often represent the first live performance opportunity for newly formed bands or regular local jam groups. Occasionally, such a band begins its rise to greater prominence, first regionally, and, less often, to national status. As such, open mics represent the base line of the large, and real pyramid upon which bluegrass is built.

The Wood Family Tradition

Mike Wood

The Wood Family Tradition represents another strand in the growth and development of a much larger bluegrass tradition: the family band with its roots in gospel music. Founded many years ago by family patriarch Al Wood, the current band, under the leadership of Mike Wood performs regionally in North Carolina, continuing a tradition with solid entertainment. The video below provides a sample of what they do. 

Bethel University Bluegrass Band(s)

The Bethel University Bluegrass Band has been a popular feature at Big Lick for the past three or four years. They represent the Renaissance Program of the University, located in McKenzie, TN, which is an exciting performing arts program with strong scholarship support. It's hard to profile the band(s) because the personnel changes markedly from year to year as students graduate and newcomers join the program. Usually, there are two bands at Big Lick representing less and more experienced students from the program. Such performances give them good opportunities to perform while honing their skills.

A Deeper Shade of Blue

Jim Fraley

A Deeper Shade of Blue has moved, during the time we've been watching them, from being an introductory band at the monthly meeting of a local bluegrass association (The Rivertown Bluegrass Society in Conway, SC) to beginning to reach toward national band status, with performances throughout the Southeast and on a cruise. They play traditional hard driving bluegrass, songs written from within the band, and gospel material. Some members of the band have touring experience, while others have turned down such opportunities to remain closer to home, family, and job.

Frank Poindexter

Sideline

Steve Dilling

Sideline was formed during the off season, when a group of veteran bluegrass musicians were looking for a side project to keep the sharp through the winter. Steve Dilling had just left the road for health reasons after twenty years with IIIrd Tyme Out. Skip Cherryholmes was settled in the Raleigh area and about to marry Dilling's daughter, and Jason Moore was always busy and ready to work. The band came together covering first and second generation bluegrass bands, and quickly had enough dates to justify purchasing a bus. There have been a few changes, with young Nathan Aldridge a standout on fiddle. The band, relying on experience and quality has quickly risen to national status.

Skip Cherryholmes

Nathan Aldridge

The Malpass Brothers

Christopher Malpass

The Malpass Brothers are not a bluegrass band, but they have found a home at bluegrass festivals across the country playing classic country music from the fifties through the eighties. They play electric instruments, have a drum on stage and a pedal steel. They have been welcomed, at least partly because a large proportion of the bluegrass audience has come to bluegrass because they can no longer find the country music they love on the radio. The brothers are very good on their own, and represent a welcome change of pace sound at the many bluegrass events where they perform.

Taylor Malpass

Flatt Lonesome

Charli Robertson

Buddy Robertson

Flatt Lonesome, one of the youngest major bands on the bluegrass stage today, has rocketed to prominence from their beginnings as a bluegrass gospel band playing churches and small festivals near their home in Callahan, Florida. Their close harmonies, youthful enthusiasm, and blend of bluegrass and country sounds have garnered numerous awards at both SPBGMA and IBMA in the past two or three years. They've risen fast in the bluegrass world, and show no signs of slowing down.

Paul Harrigal and Kelsi Robertson Harrigal

Junior Sisk

Interestingly, we also first saw Junior Sisk perform as lead singer with Alan Bibey and Blueridge at a Rivertown Bluegrass Society monthly meeting. His distinctive voice and shy manner set him aside as the "real deal." Fifteen years later, he continues, now as the front man of his own band, to sing his idols, the Stanley Brothers, as well as many songs written for him that sound as traditional as can be. Meanwhile, he's become a able band emcee, pulling together his skills as one of the best rhythm guitar players in bluegrass and one of finest tenor voices. 

Junior Sisk & Jason Davis

The Spinney Brothers

The Spinney Brothers have become sufficienly popular and successful at Big Lick to have been named the host band. They will be on hand throughout the festival, playing four sets from their substantial catalog as well as meeting a greeting friends and fans. Coming from the Annapolis Valley in their native Nova Scotia, they have spread their love for bluegrass and traditional country music across North America for over twenty years. 

Alan Spinney

The Details

Tickets: You can purchase Early Bird tickets until April first for $55.00. From April 1st on, tickets cost $75.00. Day Tickets are:

                             Thursday                                     Friday                            Saturday

Adult:                   $10.00                                       $30.00                              $35.00

12 - 16                  $ 5.00                                        $10.00                              $10.00

Under 12               Free                                            Free                                   Free

For Tickets Call: (704) 985-6987

Camping: There are some hookups and almost unlimited space for rough camping. There are good camping spots under trees for tent campers. Plenty of porta-johns are provided and there are fresh water stand pipes. To arrange for camping call:

Jeff Branch:                        (704) 985 - 6987

Hinson's Festival Park:      (704) 485 - 6987

Remember, this is an early April festival. Weather can be quite variable. Wise festival attendees come prepared for cold or rainy weather as well as sunny days. There are shade tents provided, and some festival goers erect easy-ups around the perimeter. 

How to Get to Big Lick at Hinson's Festival Park in Oakboro, NC:

Place Your Location in the Space Marked O

Click for personalized directions:

We always look forward to returning to North Carolina for much of April. Spring in North Carolina is filled with blossoms, warm sun, and bluegrass music. See you there. 

Atul Gawande - Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Atul Gowande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Macmillan, 2014, 300 pages, $26.00/12.99) confronts each reader with an inevitability that must catch all of us: Death. Everyone is going there. From the moment we are born, it's where we're headed. No matter how much we live and strive to enjoy, make meaningful, explore, and understand our life, we're all headed to the end of what's knowable. Gawande has written a much praised and read exploration, handbook, and inspiration designed to help those facing their own mortality or charged with being responsible for the dignified end of life for their loved ones. This book poses several questions which we must answer as we head down this path:

1. What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes?
2. What are your fears and hopes?
3. What trade-offs are you willing and unwilling to make?
4. What is the best course of action to achieve this understanding?

Simply put, answering these four questions will help structure the way a person approaches death and how family members can help. The book also stands as a beacon for medical practitioners, most of whom have not been trained or learned themselves in helping their patients find answers to these questions such that the they themselves can aid in answering the them rather than obstructing the solutions or striving endlessly to put off the inevitable.

Atul Gawande

Gawande, who is a McArthur genius award recipient and writes frequently for The New Yorker, is a general and thoracic surgeon practicing at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston as well as teaching at Harvard Medical School. In Being Mortal Gowande seeks to achieve several goals, and does so in an effective an entertaining fashion. He notes that changes in society have led to a move away from extended families living in the same home for a lifetime. When several generations live together, they are able to care for the aging at home, giving them the love and respect they have earned through their working lives. He tells stories about his own family, in India, as examples of a society that still functions in this way. In America, we've developed into a culture where children leave home to go out on their own, leaving death and dying in the hands of the medical establishment, rather than the home and family. He notes that the education of physicians, trained to fight ceaselessly to prolong life, has not traditionally focused on helping to ease people through end-of-life situations where the end is inevitable, but whose timing is not easily predictable. Gowande, a lively and interesting story-teller, uses case studies of families and care institutions to describe the changes developing in modern society with its increasing average age.

He describes some of the alternatives to the “old folks home” that have developed since the 1960's in response to changes in retirement patterns and the development of Medicare. He writes about a young rural doctor who developed the idea of assisted living as an alternative to nursing homes for the aging and aged. Other people people re-designed low income housing to allow aged people to maintain their independence longer while being in a setting where resident nurses and aides were on-site and professional medical care nearby. For people with greater means, residential life-care facilities have been developed. All these alternatives have, at their center, the goal of helping the aging to remain as independent as they can for as long as possible, while preparing them the slow (or not so slow) descent into disability or dementia. He bemoans the fact, that while we live in an aging society, the country has chosen, as a matter of policy, to allow the specialty of gerontology to whither on the vine as more glamorous and remunerative specialties have flourished.

Readers can use this book as a guide to thinking about and planning for their own end-of-life experience in order to make the most of it. As Gawande describes the aging process, everyone will experience increasing loss of mobility, the risk of injury from falling, the chances of debility from disease, all leading to increasing dependence and inability to care for one's self. Placing yourself in a position to experience as much comfort as possible as the process moves toward death is the goal. Reducing suffering and fear, finding ways to prepare, is challenging, but possible. Gowande describes the alternatives in graphic, but caring, fashion telling how the decline and death of patients has affected family members, physicians whose perspective is to continue fighting off death, and the patients themselves as, with the aid of family, friends, and medical personnel they seek to die with dignity and fortitude. While most people don't think of their doctors in terms of compassion, that's the word that best comes to mind for Gawande as he learns from his patients, the pioneers in gerontology he interviews, and elder care facilities he visits to introduce them to his readers.

Finally, Gawande describes Hospice as a way to approach the end with dignity in one's home under managed circumstances. Hospice emphasizes palliative care, i.e pain relief, and home care as one approaches death. The research has shown that in Hospice, people go to the hospital less often, when given the choice, and live longer. Palliative care seems to relieve stress and anxiety, relieving patients from continually fighting the illness. Gawande comments “...you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.” (pg. 178) He emphasizes the importance of advance directions concerning treatment, whether resuscitation is an alternative, how aggressive the treatment should be. He introduces an analogy comparing General George A. Custer, of Last Stand fame, with Robert E. Lee, as models for knowing when to fight and when to surrender. He redefines the role of the physician from insuring health and survival to working to enable well-being as death encroaches.

There are no easy answers to questions regarding death and dying. Gowande helps readers to think about their own deaths, and to engage in a process of preparing for it with grace and dignity. He talks more about easing suffering than he does about delaying death and curing disease in the elderly. These are not easy topics to read about in the abstract, let alone to seek to apply to one's own life. Nevertheless, the questions Gawande raises are of deep and abiding importance to those of us who are aging (that means everyone) and useful for thinking about death and preparing to face it. The earlier one thinks about these issues and makes plans to face them, the easier the days of decline are likely to be. Meanwhile, as we watch Gawande deal with his own father's decline as a physician and a loving son, we are brought into place where such thinking becomes not only possible, but desirable. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Macmillan, 2014, 300 pages, $26.00/12.99) by Atul Gawande is a book that every reader should include in their library. I bought the book and read it on my Kindle App.  

Epic Measures by Jeremy N. Smith - Book Review

Epic Measures: One Doctor, Seven Billion Patients by Jeremy N. Smith (HarperWave, 2015, 352 pages, $26.99/13.59) explores and explains the importance of “big data” in analyzing the state of world health, discovering the actual causes and relative importance of death, disease, and examining the burden of disease at it affects people's quality of life. This important and illuminating book explores the causes of what it describes as the Global Burden of Disease, the accumulated knowledge of when, where, and how people are born and die, how disease affects not only lifespan, but quality of life. To accurately discover this information, it's necessary to collect, collate, compare data down to the level of small towns and villages. The development of the data base required for this program is perhaps the most complex and important compilation of information about the state of humankind ever attempted, let alone accomplished. Its implications for health care delivery and policy are world shaking. The opportunities are truly breathtaking. This exploration and accomplishment is told through the life and career of Chris Murray, a physician, PHD epidemiologist, world traveler, high risk skier, and first rate athlete who possesses the passion, energy, intelligence, and vision to conceive and complete the largest catalog of human health ever contemplated and achieved. This book is both inspiring as Murray the person is revealed and important as it explores the potential for solving many problems in world health.

Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray

Christopher Murray is the youngest child of Minnesota physicians who gloried in world adventure travel and rural medical practice. At the age of seven, he was made responsible for charting a route across the trackless north African dessert to a small medical clinic in South Sudan, where his parents had contracted to run a clinic. When they arrived they found a bare building with no equipment, staff, or patients. Within a few days there were plenty of patients, but no medicine or equipment. During their stay, young Christopher learned and watched, developing a lifelong passion for the needs of the poor. He later enrolled at Harvard College, spent a couple of years at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he picked up a Ph.D. and, soon after his return to the U.S. Enrolled at Harvard Medical School, while simultaneously running a program dedicated to collecting health data. Everyone who knows Christopher Murray is impressed by his intelligence, energy, commitment, and likability. His drive and single-minded commitment to collecting and organizing an entire world's health data make him a challenging colleague, a demanding boss, and a problematic leader. His personality dominates this book, which is filled with able, dynamic people.

While still a relatively young man, Murray managed to be fired from institutions which lesser men strive to head or serve in for decades. Along the way, he developed metrics for creating a data base of the causes, losses, and risks of a number of diseases on a world-wide scale. Many of his studies were accepted and published in the world's most important health journal, Britain's The Lancet. He also conceived and helped develop a metric called Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY) which recognizes the costs to quality of life and longevity of pain and suffering. He discovered that many of the heretofore intractable problems of obstetric disaster and child mortality had decreased loss at the level of early life, moving many diseases and issues of adolescence and early adulthood into a higher priority. Thus accidents, murder, HIV/AIDS, and diabetes forged into the forefront of causes of early death. Not surprisingly the inertia of national health agencies and world wide collectors of data were challenged for their hidebound and sloppy systems of collection, while private and public charities resisted Murray's findings because of the threat to their fund raising capability. It was only after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation discovered Murray's work and established the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, that Murray and his team found a base from which to begin completion (the data base will never, of course, be fully and finally complete) of the first global catalog of the Burden of Disease, a data base available to all for study, analysis, and data-based decision making. The interactive charts and diagnoses, made available free worldwide to researchers, health care decision makers, and private individuals, can provide hours (years) of fascinating reading and analysis for those interested in both general matters and specific risks of specific diseases and syndromes. Take a look!

The overall analysis can pinpoint issues and diseases for health care decision makers examining the cost effectiveness and efficacy of health care efforts at the global, national, and local levels. If the death panels that Sarah Pallin claimed would be a result of the Affordable Care Act (Obama care) existed, this is where they would exist. Instead, the Global Burden of Disease data base makes rational decision making about the efficacy and efficiency of health care decisions available and allows decision making based on available resources with the assumption that each life is as worthy as every other life. Playing with the data base is fun, too!

Jeremy N. Smith

Jeremy N. Smith has written for Discover, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Chicago Tribune, among many other publications. His first book, Growing a Garden City, was one of Booklist's top ten books on the environment for 2011. Born and raised in Evanston, Illinois, he is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Montana. He lives in Missoula, Montana, with his wife and young daughter. (Publisher Profile)

Jeremy N. Smith's important book Epic Measures: One Doctor, Seven Billion Patients (HarperWave, 2015, 352 pages, $26.99/13.59) works well on two levels. It offers a fascinating portrait of Dr. Christopher Murray, a physician and epidemiologist, whose driven commitment to accumulating accurate data to catalog the state of world health in order to help develop policies and practices leading to its improvement led to the publication of the data in the Global Burden of Health. At the same time, Smith describes the turf wars and bureaucratic in-fighting of the health industry (for want of a better name) serving to maintain the status-quo and cater to parochial self-interest. The tension developed between Murray's drive against the lethargy and obfuscation of the world's health powers forms the central themes of this intriguing and illuminating tale. I recommend it highly to those who are interested in health care policy and maintaining personal health practices leading to longer, happier lifespans. Spending some time studying the web site linked to above and here can increase the power of this story. I read Epic Measures as an electronic galley provided by the publisher through Edelweiss. I read it on my Kindle app.