- Hello, Spoonaverse. Recently, I uploaded a video that was talking a little
bit about self image and the way we judge others. And after reading the
comments in that video and during the recent live
stream when I was asking folks what else they wanted to hear about, one of the most often asked questions is how I learned to play the spoons. So I figured I would give
you a brief, short history without giving away too much so I can tell you some stories later. And let you know how I played, or learned to play the spoons. There was a point in my life where I decided to go traveling. And when I mean traveling,
I was hitchhiking and riding freight trains
around the United States. I've been across the country on foot the long way a couple of times, and the short way a couple of times. When I first started traveling,
I didn't have many skills. And I didn't have a lot
of street smarts either. I went around and waited
in a lot of labor pools, trying to get jobs here and
there for different things. I had a forklift driving license that didn't really do me a lot of good. And I was pretty much broke all the time. I had literally nailed myself to Denver. I had a friend that drove for the US mail and I transferred with his load and got dropped off in downtown Denver. And I didn't have much
of anything to my name, maybe a hundred bucks. And so eventually drifting out of Denver, and I'll tell you how in another story, I made my way across the
country a little bit. I went up to Oregon and down
California through Arizona and eventually ended up in Savannah. And all along that way, I did everything from working state fairs, to doing miscellaneous carnivals, to sewing jobs, and all
sorts of stuff like that. I even picked pecans and Alabama, trying to make a little bit
of money here and there. All along the road I
met different travelers who were traveling the same way I was, just kind of drifting around, trying to find some sort of
meaning within their own life. I ran into musical travelers consistently. Music and street performance, or busking, kind of seemed like a good way for folks to earn a living from city to city, depending on what the laws are of course. One of the other travelers I was with borrowed some spoons from
Paula Deen's restaurant, sorry Paula Dean, and taught me how to hold them in my hands and how
to run 'em down my fingers. And I just kind of kept
fiddling with it from there. I did marching cadences while I was walking down the
highway, thumbing a ride, and I just kind of sat there
and figured it out by myself. I even went into some
of the public libraries 'cause I didn't have a
smartphone to watch videos of folks like Artis the Spoonman, and try to figure out how
they were playing spoons. And I would bring my
spoons into a library, it's a little hard to figure
out spoon playing moves, being quiet with headphones
on in the library, I gotta tell you. But I figured out a good
number of little moves. And eventually I quit
annoying people with it. At first folks would pay me to leave. They would say, "Hey, you're
underneath my office building, will you please get outta here? I can't concentrate. Here's some cash." And I would be wandering off on my way. Still better off than
I was before, mind you. But you know, eventually that turned into, "Oh, bless your heart. Here's five bucks." To, "Oh that's kinda cool." And eventually I gathered my first crowd, and I'll tell that story in
a totally different video, 'cause that's a great story that involves quarantine areas and Chippendales dancers. But I ended up wandering
around the country and a lot of times I would
find myself traveling alone. And so I built a washboard with all sorts of knickknacks and pattywacks and I drug it all around
the country with me. And I played in places by myself, just kind of making up rhythms and trying to figure out the spoons. And luckily there's musicians
all along the railways and on the roadways traveling, you know, just as I was traveling. And so I got to play
music waiting on trains and waiting on rides and
camping out in places with all sorts of really
awesome folk musicians. And thus got to learn how
to play music with others, which is a totally different thing. I used to use Nashville,
Tennessee as a home base because it was such a good
street performance city at one point. It's no longer such a good
street performance city. The police have always kind of chased off the street performers there. And for this reason or that reason, but even more recently, more often. Which is sad because a lot of
really famous Nashville names started out as street performers. I do feel like Nashville, Tennessee coulda had a street performance scene that rivaled New Orleans,
but they chose not to. Eventually I watched tourism eat up what was left of street
performance in Nashville. Eventually the streets
were way too crowded for street performance, and the city did nothing
whatsoever to save any of it. And so I ended up moving on. And for a while I went to Chapel Hill and I stayed with a friend of mine there. And I liked Chapel Hill and
it's nice and it's calming, but I got a little bored. So I went to Asheville, North Carolina. And I had it so fresh in my mind about what I had witnessed in Nashville. This really awesome flourishing
street performance scene being crushed by tourism. And so in Asheville, North Carolina, I started the Asheville's
Buskers Collective with a handful of other street performers. And we together, talked with the city and
kind of became a liaison to keep street performance legal in Asheville, North Carolina. And there's a great street
performance scene there now, which is why I've been in Asheville for about five years now. During that time, I've been really, really active in a lot of city meetings, talking about issues that
I find dear to my heart. And especially after my
experiences traveling, such as street performance
or homelessness. the weekend after Thanksgiving just now was my last weekend to go
busking as an Asheville resident, as I'm going to be moving
into my tiny little green bus and traveling and going
to visit so many of you. I'm hoping to talk to a
lot of other city groups, arts councils, and police departments about street performance and what it is. In the hopes that maybe somebody else can have the experience I
had with street performance literally lifting them up in such a way. (spoons clacking)
