Two Pistols for the Low Road
To call Morris’s music Appalachian is to maybe brush it with a string of handmade bracelets. His shows had hippie chicks dancing without bras in their bare feet, another detail that stands out after twenty years. Morris could express a range of emotion in online conversation, but in performance he did not much acknowledge the audience he had up and grooving in a tradition foreign to the river way. He played fast with a lot of folkies, fiddle players, those short hexagon accordions, mando, stand up bass, woodwind, himself a talented guitarist, violinist, more. If they played it in the Balkans he likely used it on the stage. Scheherazade showed up on the fringes of his gigs, from when travelers pressed their spirit gum against Morris’s forehead and he swore to never wash it off. There were a bevy of toddlers at his shows as the band and their community had all plumbed the depths of their fertility at once, or so it seemed. It was a family show transplanted from the agrarian. The arrangements were portive. He took outdoor gigs and projected a vibe in line with practices of living that modern economics have passed by. It stirred something in anyone with people from the Old Country.