Pickin' Party!

It won't be long before it's time once again for the Pickin' Party Old-Time Music Festival, which will be held on Memorial Day weekend (May 28-29) at Land Between The Lakes National Recreation Area, along the KY-TN border.

This year the party will be emceed by 23-year Kentucky Opry veteran, Scottie Henson. The lineup for the two-day event includes Mark Dvorak, the Dixie Volunteers, the Cumberland River Plowboys, Dan Knowles, Bawn in the Mash (pictured above), Steephill Travelers, Common Thread, Red River Breeze, and Nathan Blake Lynn.

There will also be daily open mic sessions that anyone is free to get in on, so bring an instrument!

Graves of Old-Time Country Musicians

Fiddlin' Doc Roberts, Richmond Cemetery, Richmond, KY.


Asa Martin, Hargett First Church of God Cemetery, Hargett, KY.


Bill Monroe, Rosine Cemetery, Rosine, KY.


Armour Cornelison, Jr., Richmond Cemetery, Richmond, KY.

Under the Double Eagle

Like the Winged Disc of Horus, another ancient occult symbol often found on Kentucky's graves is the Double-headed Eagle. These two examples are in Louisville's Cave Hill.


The Double-headed Eagle is most commonly associated with the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which is why you find it so often on gravestones. Manly P. Hall says it's an alchemical symbol of the union between the masculine and feminine principles in the individual, but as with most of his explanations to the public, there's probably much more than meets the eye.

The symbol itself predates the Scotch-Rite Masons, the earliest written reference to which is 1733. The Hittites held the symbol in great esteem, and were carving representations of it as early as two thousand years before the birth of Christ (see photo below). (Also note the resemblance to the Winged Disc symbol, with the downward pointing tail, the shield replacing the sun-disk, and the twin heads replacing the twin antennae or serpents.)



After that, the mysterious symbol turns up in all kinds of places throughout history, from the Byzantine Empire to the Holy Roman Empire to the German Confederation of 1815.

Today one can also find vestiges of this tradition in the flag of Albania, the flag of Serbia, the insignia of the Turkish Police, and in the symbology of the Greek Orthodox Church.



The tune "Under the Double Eagle" is a very popular instrumental in the Kentucky-based Bluegrass music genre, but most are unaware of its source. Bluegrass pickers learned it from old recordings of John Philip Sousa's version, but Sousa himself picked it up from German military bands, who in turn derived it from Josef Wagner's 1902 Unter dem Doppeladler. Wagner's tune's title referred to the Coat of Arms of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867), which in turn derives from the House of Habsburg (circa 1100).

Blue Moon

Random disassociated fragments, in search of glue:

1. Elvis Presley, in private moments filtered through his own internal gobo of pills and vodka, often stated that he felt as if he was not of this world.

2. The mysterious term "blue moon" is one whose origin is shrouded in antiquity, and has seemed to have had numerous meanings over time. The first recorded instance of the term was in British in the year 1528. Interestingly, the first recorded instance of the idea of moon being made of green cheese was one year later, in 1529.

3. According to some ancient myths, a blue moon is a rarely occurring magical event during which the moon's cratered face speaks.

4. The term "blue moon" is most commonly used metaphorically to describe a rare event, as in the saying "once in a blue moon".

5. Kentuckian Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, wrote "Blue Moon of Kentucky" in 1947.

5. According to Wikipedia: "Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but each calendar year contains those twelve full lunar cycles plus about eleven days to spare. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years there is an extra full moon (this happens every 2.72 years). Different definitions place the extra moon at different times - the extra moon is called a blue moon".

6. Many people call a full moon a blue moon if it was the second of two full moons to occur in the same calendar month. However, this definition of "blue moon" originated from a mistake in an article in the March 1946 Sky & Telescope magazine. This mistake has perpetuated and taken on a life of its own since 1946.

7. Elvis Presley had an unusual propensity for recording "blue" songs, and three of them specifically were blue moon songs: "Blue Moon", "Blue Moon of Kentucky", and "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again".

8. "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again" was written in 1941 by Kentuckians Wiley Walker and Gene Sullivan.

9. The band R.E.M. featured a blue moon on the cover of their "In Time" compilation CD.

10. One of R.E.M.'s biggest hits was "Man on the Moon", which seems to express doubt that mankind actually went to the moon, and also mentions Elvis.

11. In an early interview, Michael Stipe said that R.E.M. actually stood for Ralph Eugene Meatyard, a Kentuckian best known for his epic photographic work The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.

12. The blue people of Kentucky were originally believed by some to be aliens, or angels, from another world.

13. The matriarch of the best-known Kentucky blue-people clan was named Luna.

Blue Grass

For a fledgling tourist to Kentucky, one of the biggest mysteries is "where is the blue grass?" Often have I heard newbies inquiring about where to find it, and I've even heard them pull the wool over their own eyes and convince themselves that they're seeing it: "oh, look, Martha, the grass really is kinda bluish here."

Fact o' the matter is, blue grass isn't blue. It's as green as any other kind of grass, green as the valley, green as them little apples, green as the grass of home.

Blue grass is a common grass called poa pratensis, and it's only blue when you allow it grow tall like weeds, so that the blue-flowered seed heads can bloom in Spring. Ironically, because Kentucky is "horse country" and thus covered in groomed and manicured farms, you rarely ever see fields of unmown blue grass. Small patches of poa pratensis are everywhere you look, to be sure, but it takes a whole huge vista of rolling hills covered in the flowering plants to get that "blue" effect.

Despite popular assumptions, poa pratensis isn't even especially indigenous to Kentucky. It's an extremely common plant in North America, and all across the world. Had some other plant, such as Witch Hazel, Ginseng or Devil's Trumpet, become the official symbol of Kentucky instead, bluegrass music might have ended up being called "Devil's Trumpet Music". Then tourists would then be wondering why there's no trumpets in Devil's Trumpet Music. And can you imagine the Devil's Trumpet Army Depot?