What A Friend

Here's a slide show of photos taken at Macedonia Christian Church this past Sunday with the Kenwood Players performing "What A Friend We Have In Jesus" as the soundtrack. I used iMovie (for the first time), to create and compress the file. Then after several failures at uploading directly to Blogger, went to YouTube, created an account, uploaded the video, have now come back to Blogger to embed it. Writing this while waiting for YouTube to "process" the uploaded video. If this all works, it will be a great way to make available what we're up to.

The preacher in that one photo is Crawford, one of the two Eb tuba players in the group, and his sermon was on the power of music to move us. That's me with the guitar, and Judy is barely visible brushing the drum. After my opening vocal, that's a Bill B. solo on alto sax, then Steve with one on trombone, then Dick on trumpet, then closing with another vocal with the congregation, which you can't hear very well because of where the recorder was placed. Maggie is playing harmony on clarinet. Bill C., the other tuba player wasn't with us for this performance.

My opinion of tracks on these performance CD's I've been doing often changes over time, but so far, this track feels like it's crossed the threshold of something to use on the CD portion of the learning materials.

As for Macedonia itself, the acoustics are amazingly good and welcoming, and I've come to have some strong personal connections with members of the congregation. A story I've heard about those beautiful pews is that there's some graffiti on one left by a soldier during the Civil War. The church is not that far from the Wilderness battlefield on one side and the Meadow Farm estate of the Taylor family on the other. The Taylors were the ones who encouraged James Madison's people to come to the area, which is how he came to grow up here.

update - I adjusted color on the photos, forgetting I'm a little red/green color blind. Seems I gave Crawford a red face. Sorry, Crawford!!!