The Power of Music

A friend of mine recently mentioned having gone out to see Toni Price at her Hippy Hour.  She's a local musician who has been doing a Hippy Hour in South Austin for a couple of decades.  It got me to thinking about the last time I saw her.  Some shows end up changing my life forever, and her show was one of them. 
http://www.toniprice.com/

I was relatively new to Austin and KGSR (a local radio station) was doing their weekly show for the month of February at Lucy's Boat Yard. This was a restaurant off of Lake Austin with a boating theme.  They were known for their pizza because they had brought someone in from Italy to teach them or train them in Italian pizza making.  It was  relatively small restaurant, but had two stories and a deck.  KGSR shows were weekly, maybe every other week, and on Wednesday nights.  It was a fun place to go and I always wanted to go on another night and try their pizza.  I never made it before the restaurant closed and I found out I was allergic to dairy and wheat.    

 That year Toni's show at Lucy's Boat Yard was right around the time her Dobrough player had been featured on NPR.  I was fascinated by the sound of the dobrough.  Lucy's Boat Yard got crowded and the friend I was with and I ended up standing on the stairwell to be able to see and hear the show. (I hear better when I can see.  Ha ha ha!!!)  There were some men standing or sitting in front of us.  They had been fans of Toni's for years.  They looked like old sailors.  Like they'd been out to sea for a long time and were missing most of their teeth..  They knew Toni's music well.  

Later in the show Toni started doing songs they were more familiar with, or their favorite songs.  They told us, "This is the good shit.  This is the good shit."  The more she sang or the further she got in her set list the more excited they got.  It's great to see people respond so favorably to music.  It's kind of a sacred moment when their soul responds to the music, when it feeds them like so few things can.  So, to this day when I"m out listening to music and hear a great song, I say to myself, "This is the good shit.  This is the shit."  And I think of them.  

That season I struggled finding people to go with me to Lucy's Boat Yard.  It was a unique venue, it was cool and had lots of charm.  I missed some shows I would have liked to go to because I was too chicken shit to go by myself.  So I decided that as long as it was a venue I was comfortable going to and if I wanted to go I wouldn't let flying solo scare me or keep me from going to hear music I wanted to hear.