I’ve been enjoying knocking around the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood I’ve been living in for about a year. The onetime suburban outpost of Northwest D.C. and terminus of the trolley line is now seemingly centralized, with history sprouting at every block. Yes Helen Hayes and Walter Johnson lived here, but it was the music connections that blew my mind. Bo Diddley settled on Newton Street in the early 60s and recorded in the basement. Duke Ellington lived just east of here in Columbia Heights. And for some reason, bluegrass and country thrived in the rowhouses as well, with stars such as Charlie Waller living on Park Street. He and his Country Gentlemen shared a song swap there when the Kingston Trio were in town in 1959.
Jimmy Dean, in the decades before the sausage business, being the entertainer he was living in an 18th Street rooming house.
In the mid-50s, Dean hosted a local TV show described as “Your Favorite Hillbilly Jamboree,” though its cumbersome full title was “Connie B. Gay’s Town and Country Time.” At the same time Jimmy Dean and his Texas Wildcats often headlined at the Starlite Restaurant, a long gone country headquarters at 14th and Irving.
But there were other places for music as well, according to the picture book “Images of America: Mount Pleasant” by Mara Cherkasky. Zeb Turner’s hillbilly band played the Cross Town Lounge on Mt. Pleasant St. Hillbilly performers also played the Raven Grill, which is still there, as one of the great dive bars in town, but doesn’t have live music. The Oasis Club on Mt. Pleasant was the rock and roll club in the 50s.
So the idea of musicians carrying around their instruments, going to local gigs or just going to house parties to play and pass the hat is not some recent practice of the younger people who’ve moved in here. It’s part of the tradition of the place.
At a midweek gathering up the street this week, that spirit came alive not only in the music, which was of a kind that the old musicians would recognize — blues and ballads and acoustic laments, in pristine harmonies, done on acoustic guitar, and ukelele, banjo and clarinet, with a bit of discreet washboard and percussion in the background, along with the toe-tapping. And yeah, there was some singing along as well.
Jess Eliot Myrhe of the Sligo Creek Stompers is used to this kind of approach; she’s a remarkably talented musician on a number of instruments, with an expressive, bluesy voice. For this performance she teamed up with Sandy Robson, who performs under the name Letitia VanSant. She’s got a pack of original songs and a voice that sounds like it’s froum the mountains, ethereal and verging on a yodel. She accompanies herself most often on ukelele and guitar but has been learning banjo as well.
The show was the first public performance for the duo (if you can call a house concert public), just as it was for the opener, a duo who at least had a name for their band, Ballad’ve. It combines the smoky folk voice of Margaret Wasaff with the old timey cred of Anders Fahey on banjo and just the right harmony. He even wears suspenders (just as the women in the other duo wear plain cotton dresses).
Because it was the first performance for both groups, she joked “You’re seeing history.”
But judging from the heritage of the neighborhood, and the many unknown house concerts and hootenannies that have probably taken place in row homes of the same street decades before, she was absolutely right.