hootinanity

My new Deering "Goodtime" banjo is the most aptly-named instrument I have ever known. I bought it a few weeks ago at Mountain Music Shoppe in Shawnee and every time I pick it up I have a hard time putting it back down. With my new five string, a few blues harps and a bit of inspiration from folks like Sonny Terry and Two Dollar Shoe, I've dabbled quite a bit in Americana lately.

This past Friday night, we had us a hootenanny. It went down in a kitchen on tennessee street with Zach, Ben and I yelling and me playing harp, someone playing spoons and a storm blowing in. When I told my friend Nick about it the next day he said it sounded like it was "the hootenaniest hootenanny to ever hoot a nanny."

It amazed me, the way Nick made that line up on the spot and delivered it like it was nothing. I did some thinking later and decided that hootenanny would make a great separable prefix verb in German, namely, Nannyhooten.

For example, "Wir haben eine Nanny gehootet."

sample dialogue:

Lars: Klara, Heute Abend hooten wir eine Nanny. Hast du Lust, mitzuhooten?

Klara: Ja, ich habe Lust, aber leider kann ich nicht so gut nannyhooten :(

Lars: Quatsch! Das kann Jeder! Deshalb machen Hootenannys so viel Spass!

Or something like that. That won't be of much interest to you if you don't speak German, but if you don't, maybe it will help encourage you to learn. Maybe.

I will leave you now with a photo of a man called Apple-Core Jack. He is so named because he was carved from an apple core, and the name Jack seems to fit. I salvaged him from my grandfather's house shortly before the bulldozers took it down.