Street Busking...

We hit the Lufkin Streets last night as a 5 piece billing ourselves as Mule Armstrong and the Meat Sweats. Members were Mary and Miguel Meat Sweat, Necklips, Mudbelly, and special guest Banjo Bill. We quickly recruited new members with Don Miguel Meat Sweat joining us on goat hooves percussion and Dave, a Seminary Student currently assigned to St. Patrick's on guitar. 

We normally like to be in the food truck area but we set up outside Manhattan Restaurant for this evening since there was another group down in our favorite spot. Here's Cathy, Bill and Mary. If you are looking for us on these evenings you are going to have to get out of your car and find us. No telling where we will set up.

Miguel on uke and banjolele. Back behind him on that very corner is where my Great Grandfather Quiller Nerren often sat after his retirement from grave digging for Gipson's Funeral Home and held court in the late 1940s. There was a bank located there in those days on what is the corner of Lufkin Avenue and 1st Street. and Quiller knew all who passed. I don't know how Quiller got to town to this spot as his golden years progressed. He lived not terribly far out of town, just across Timberline Drive on Lufkin Avenue across from the HillCrest/Glendale/Oddfellows Cemetery.  It was nice that he lived so close to work. 

Don Miguel was shakin' em on down laying down a strong percussion beat. 

Bill plays uke. 

Here's Necklips. 

Some of the tunes we played Cathy has been singing with her dad since she was 3 years old. 

We played two hours with a break in between for an Old Souls Food Truck fill up. 

Dave the Seminarian. He's studying to be a Catholic Priest at a school in New Orleans. He's assigned to St. Patrick's and is due to return to New Orleans for more study next week. He will be back to our parish around Christmas. 

Help me out on this. Here is a photo of the poke man players gathered around the Old Pines Theater. Seems like there was a science fiction novel where people that were playing some kind of game and entered such a trance state that the rest of the world just let them pass by in the work place, church services, meetings and public gatherings and on the street with kindness and patience because they knew that they could not be helped.  Anybody that spent the late 1970s in their dorm room with a stack of scifi paperbacks remember the name of that book? We are there now. It has came to pass.  

We kind of thought with all the people downtown playing this game that some would stop and listen to our music. They did not but best I can tell some rare poke mans were spotted all around us. 

We did make money. Enough for a round of small smoothies at Standpipe. I've made less so we call this great success.