The Beat Goes on in Champaign County, Ohio

I’ll keep the words to a minimum in this post and let some music video clips do the talking. This fall in Champaign County, Ohio, we’ve been fortunate to have a good share of good outdoor musical entertainment–a good portion of it homegrown. Last weekend there was the Hylo Brown Bluegrass Festival in Mechanicsburg and the Ohio Fish and Shrimp Festival at Freshwater Farms, north of Urbana.

And this Saturday (September 25), I enjoyed hearing one of my favorite local bands, the Muleskinners, at Urbana University’s Johnny Appleseed birthday celebration. Here they are performing “Hello, Mary Lou.”

Saturday night, band parents that we are, my wife, Kay, and I rode one of the buses with the Urbana High School marching band to the 39th annual Graham High School Band Festival. One of our first dates was to the Graham Band Festival, when I covered it as a reporter for the Urbana Daily Citizen. In the clip below that’s our snare drumming son Alex.

And I’ll leave you with this clip from Fat City Blues, a new local band that performed last weekend at the Music4Meals food pantry benefit concert at the Ohio Fish and Shrimp Festival. I missed it since I was on the road again with the UHS marching band.