Heidi Douglas & the Kentucky Mountain Trio

In November Joan and I drove her father, Denver, down to McCreary County in southern Kentucky, not far from Bimble, the closest town to the little hill country farm where Denver was born and raised. We spent a few days in the Eagle Falls Resort and RV Park, just a quarter mile from Cumberland Falls, a local attraction which has been described as the Niagara Falls of the south. The comparison, believe me, is in no way based on the relative sizes of the two falls.
But small as Cumberland Falls is, it nevertheless possesses some curiously local charms, one of which is the way the river scoops chunks of coal from the seams along its banks, wears them into smooth black pebbles, and deposits them in wide beds along the shore above the falls. A burlap bag and a shovel will get you enough to feed your stove for a week. There’s a restaurant at the Eagle Falls Resort, which feels more like a family kitchen than a place to get real excited about what might be on the menu. But on a Friday night the (new) owner of the motel came knocking on the doors of the handful of paying guests. “You’all come down to the restaurant! We’ve got gospel singers and free drinks!” Well, the drinks of course were coffee and soda, and the gospel was really mountain music done by the Kentucky Mountain Trio, a little group of teenagers whose playing and singing seemed to be handed straight down from their grandparents. I listened for a while, paid for a piece of chocolate cake, and then fired up my camera.
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the first day of 2010 then to listen to a few songs by Heidi Douglas (click for Heidi’s youtube site), Israel Clark and Cody Canada.