One of the things you need to remember when in this part of the country is that you are not in the deep south, but rather in Appalachia. People tend to distinguish between “The North” and “The South” by the historical civil war Union vs Confederate boundaries, and the “Western states” being those that joined the USA after the war — and usually involve cowboys and Indians, but from a cultural standpoint that would be a mistake. I tend to agree with Colin Woodard who instead breaks the US up into 11 cultural regions, and Dalton GA by that reckoning falls into the Appalachia. As a result, one of the great things about this area is the active Appalachian music scene. I ran into live music of this sort on numerous occasions while staying in the area, for instance, there was live music every Thursday night at the whole foods in Chattanooga.
On this occasion it was about 3pm, and my old friend from art school and I … whom I am currently staying with, she also has a travel blog (hers can best be described as “sophisticated and restful vacationing” while mine is more about ‘cheap & earthy travel’), were all dressed up tonight and found we had no where to go. We had been planning to go to this local street event here in Dalton that my friend had been talking about for days. Unfortunately, she had assumed it was going to go till 5pm, when to our chagrin we discovered it had already ended at about 2pm. But, since she’s a woman who will never be daunted, she did some research and found that a band was playing downtown at a moonshine distillery/bar.
Now the thing you need to realize is Dalton’s downtown is that it is about 5 minutes wide, and 10 minutes long … and that’s walking. And yet, you can still, well … to be fair, on a Saturday night, still find cultural things to do within in.
You can’t really tell from my recording, the reverb off the brick walls in the space wasn’t conducive to it, but the band, called “Unbridled Strings“ is very good, with a high level of musicianship.
One of the amusing things that happened that night was the tempreture was beginning to drop and my friend, who was wearing a kind of light and breezy blouse said just as the band had stopped to take a break: “I’m getting a little cold”
Me: “You know you could pop home and get a jacket and be back before the break is over”
Essentially, she is so used to living here that she forgot just how small the place is
(when I first met her we were in art school in London, and she was living in LA).
Rebecca Radnor's Personal Blog: Consider yourselves warned! 