harvest jubilee vs. the south end nettle festival

September 22nd, 2007

The Band was real pleased when we got invited to play this Harvest Jubilee. We used to have —- on the wild wild South End  —- our own farming celebration, a 3 day extravaganza of music and partying where after the harvests, the weary South Enders would drop their shovels and their hoes, their sickles and their scythes and pick up their jugs and head on down to the Tyee fairgrounds and auto wrecking yard for the annual Nettle Festival.
     My god those were great times!!  The nettle maze alone was two acres of itchin labyrinth some folks nearly lost their minds in!!  Oh, I know, you couldn’t do that these days.  But back then that was funnier than poison ivy in your cornflakes.  Or the greased telephone pole climb.  Those creosote splinters, man! You’d be pulling those for days.  Oh sure, they got infected sometimes, but we were tougher back then.  We didn’t have it easy like the farmers today.  Tractors and harvesters and all the conveniences a million dollar bank loan can buy.  The only migrant labor WE had was our own kids.  Couple seasons in the stinging fields, they’d be migrating somewhere else. No, we toiled in the pitiless sun harvesting ten foot nettles by hand.  Baling em with those same blistered stung up hands.  Taking em to market in Stanwoodopolis where the commodity prices were manipulated by the rich Scandihooviens and were sometimes half what it took to grow em.
    We NEEDED a festival.  Sure, we didn’t have fancy tractor and lawnmower pulling contests.  But we had Jug Pulling.  Serious Jug Pullin.  Liquor board wouldn’t condone it now.  But those were harder times.  Callous times maybe.  Hoo boy, that nettle mash moonshine.  Sure took the edge off all that hard work.  Probably shaved a few years too.  Didn’t matter.  Life was so hard back then we were glad to shave a few years.  And if we lost a few in the nettle maze, didn’t matter either. 
This next song maybe captures that era.  Maybe even captures the one we got now down our way.  SOUTH END BLUES!!

Entry Filed under: after the rapture (apocalypse then)