Loose Leaf Notes

My favorite part of the Floyd Country Store, home of the famous Friday Night Jamboree, is the seating. When the store reopened this past summer, after a renovation that allowed for more room, the lightweight plastic and folding chairs covered with colorful cushions and crocheted seat pads got my attention. The jamboree crowd has always been a full house that spilled out onto the street, and I had never seen the chairs empty before. I was struck by how hospitable they looked and wondered about the people who provided such a homemade touch for the comfort of others.
The renovated store looks especially pretty lit up at night. It was decked in Christmas lights when Joe and I arrived this past Friday night (the day after Thanksgiving) to meet up with my son, Josh, his girlfriend, Anna, and Anna’s family who were in town from Minnesota. Even with the expanded space, which holds more than a few hundred people, by the time we got there every seat was filled. We stood in the aisle, shoulder to shoulder with others watching the Sigmon Stringers, a family bluegrass band from North Carolina. From the start of their set, the dance floor was never empty. The click and clack of the flatfooters could be heard over the fiddle playing band, whose youngest member looked to be about twelve. The oldest might have been her Grandpa.
I was wearing clogs, the wrong kind of shoes for flatfooting, a mountain style of step dancing that resembles tap and is related to clogging. Even if I knew how to flatfoot or could contain myself enough to dance using only my feet, I didn’t want to chance it with the shoes I had on.
Watching the spirited dancing done by people of all ages, I began to think about my mother and father’s last visit to Floyd when I took them to the jamboree. It was just a couple of years before my dad, a WWII vet born to South Boston Massachusetts Irish immigrants, passed away. We had seats right up front. I tried to convince him to dance with me by explaining how flatfooting was related to Irish step dancing, brought over by the Scotch Irish settlers. But flatfooting was too much of a leap for my dad, who was more comfortable doing the jitterbug.
When and if you do score a seat on a busy jamboree night, you’ll be bound to get to know your neighbor in the similar way you do when you sit next to someone on a plane or any other close quarters. Eventually Joe and I found ourselves nestled in a back corner of dance hall, sitting next to a couple that we struck up a lively conversation with. The man, a Floyd native, bore the family name of the road I regularly take from the Blue Ridge Parkway into town. He shared some interesting bits of history about our neighborhood that we didn’t know, and in the time it took for a few songs to be played, we all knew a good bit about each other.
After awhile I wandered around to the front of the store to see what the rest of my group were doing. Some were browsing through the rack of music CD’s. There was talk of a hot fudge sundae from the soda fountain. Josh and Anna were on the dance floor waltzing. I ran into the Country Store owner, Woody Crenshaw, who was wearing denim bib overalls and a baseball cap over his sandy brown longish hair. As we talked, I checked out his shoes, more flatfoot worthy than mine, I decided.
“You need to put some metal taps on those, Woody, so we can hear you when you dance,” I said.
“No. Those are only for the good dancers,” he answered.
Seems you don’t want to draw attention to yourself until you master the dance. Taps are something you have to work your way up to.
Post Notes: See Josh and Anna dancing the waltz at the Friday Night Jamboree HERE and Woody talking about the Jamboree HERE. And HERE’S a close-up , especially for Kenju, of someone flatfooting.