BLUE SKY JAMFEST!
All weekend long.

The triumphant return of a music festival to Louisville. It's about time. I'll be working the whole weekend in the Bluegrass Anonymous tent. Bring your instrument and jam in our tent. We'll have a trailer for instrument check-in, a small stage for impromptu performances, an area for open jamming, and all the Bluegrass info your tiny human brain can stand.

And the Derailers are playing. So be there.

Posted 10:28 AM by Jackson Cooper |

The wide range of neighborhoods in Louisville is remarkable. From the Highlands to Shively to Old Louisville to St. Mathews to Germantown to Hikes Point, you can drive around for less than an hour and hit most of the major areas. And I do a lot of aimless driving around. So I feel like I understand our city pretty well.

But there is one place, one single plot of land, which blows my mind every time I drive by.

J-town, on the whole, is a fairly unremarkable place. It's a common story: small town swallowed whole by sprawling development of the nearest bigger city. But J-town has a lot of character and an unusually disparate group of neighborhoods within its limits. The Bluegrass Industrial Park is in J-town, and the revenue collected from the businesses therein puts the firemen in new trucks and makes the J-town Police the best paid in the state. Floyd's Fork Park. The train trestle. Several "deed restricted" residential neighborhoods.

Then when you drive down Waterston Trail, just past Ruckreigel, you go past several oldish looking houses. They have the look of houses that were built at least 100 years ago. And just past that, there's an old graveyard.

This graveyard would be interesting if just for its placement and proximity to several new subdivisions. It's moderately well kept, but the grass always looks a couple days past needing to be cut.

Then comes the weirdness. There's a gravel drive heading through the middle of the graveyard. It splits the lot all the way to the back, where sits a run-down house, surrounded by what looks like a junkyard.

It's not all that strange to see a run-down house in J-town with a bunch of junk in the yard. But its placement at the back end of a graveyard is a little strange.

And then there's the barbeques: the completely out-of-place, inexplicable barbeques that seem to be going-on every time I drive past.

There are a number of old cars parked around the house, almost indistinguishable from the junked ones that never move. Outside, surrounding the front porch, are a congregation of lawn chairs and coolers. It's impossible to see from the road, but I'd guess the people in the lawn chairs and the coolers are both accompanied by beers of varying, but entirely domestic brands. The music isn't loud enough to hear from the road, but I'd imagine it's there. Maybe Oldies, or Classic Rock, or Soul, or Country, or R&B. I don't quite know what the appropriate soundtrack might be for a barbeque in a graveyard.

The people always look like they’re having a good time. They look much happier than the folks in the neighborhoods a couple of blocks down who get home late from work and spend a lot of time cutting grass.

They look like they don't mind that people are buried a few yards away. They look like a cool breeze dancing across the grave stones, through the mesh nylon back of the lawn chair, pulling the humidity down onto the cold can of beer which drips onto their leg is the perfect addition to the evening.

I don't know why they pick that place to gather. But maybe it's the fact that nobody will come around to bother them. The folks in the new suburbs certainly won't come by. My guess is that hardly anybody notices them sitting outside in their lawn chairs, drinking beer and raising a little hell in the graveyard.


Posted 9:37 AM by Jackson Cooper |

Caleb Brown, local journalist and reporter for WHAS radio, has a blog of his own, and one dedicated to Public Affairs in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Very good stuff.

Posted 4:20 PM by Jackson Cooper |