Among the performers set to perform Saturday for Arts & The Park is a Mountain View-based Old Time band, Memaw & The Squirrel Chasers, which is sure to encourage the crowd to get up and shake a leg.
Crystal McCool, the Memaw of the group, recently spoke to The Sentinel-Record about her band and her excitement at getting to bring her daughter to the Spa City.
"So we're bringing strictly Old Time for this event, so we're not going to be playing bluegrass. We play Old Time and we play bluegrass as well, but Memaw, that group specializes in Old Time. Of course, we have the Old Time State Fiddle Champion Mary Parker, so she's awesome," McCool said.
"And then we have my daughter, Lillyanne, who is -- well she's won the state so many times they've kicked her out and made her start judging it -- and then she's also won the National Old Time Banjo Championship, so she's going to be playing old clawhammer frailing style of banjo, and then my husband (Jackie), who's going to be playing rhythm guitar, and then myself on an upright bass, and we're going to be doing a lot of kind of dance style tunes," she said.
Joining the band will be Keith Symanowitz, who will teach dance lessons prior to the band's performance, and then audience members can test out what they learned during the band's performance.
Old Time is a music genre that predates modern genres such as rock, rap and country, originating before the recording industry. McCool said their group plays songs from the "late 1800s, early 1900s, some of it going all the way back to the 1500s. There's one song that Lillyanne does that came out the same year as the King James Version of the Bible."
"There's going to be some really old tunes. That's pretty much what we specialize in is the old stuff," she said, noting her daughter is the reason she and her husband first got interested in Old Time music.
"Oddly enough, she's in a Music Roots program, so she started on banjo when she was in fourth grade," McCool said. "She brings her banjo home from class and my husband, who's a three-finger banjo player, he's like 'Hey, where's the rest of your banjo?' and she's like, 'That's all they gave me,' and he goes, 'Well you tell them we didn't lose that resonator, you know, we're not going to pay for that.'"
It was "an Old Time banjo" and "so we got into it because that's what she started playing and it was a real introduction to us to that realm. I fell in love with the Old Time fiddling, I play fiddle too, and I just loved it," she said.
"We're hoping that this weekend everyone else will fall in love with it. If they've not heard Old Time, maybe they'll be like me and when they hear it they'll be like 'Oh, I've got to have more of this,'" she said.
"I'm excited y'all are having this kind of music in Hot Springs. In our neck of the woods, Old Times (is) a pretty prevalent thing, you know, it's pretty common. I know from living (in Hot Springs) it's not near as common down there, so I'm hoping that everyone else will just love it," she said.
For McCool, the appeal of the genre is the lyrics, she said. "Those are real experiences. It's not, and there's a lot of history to be taught just through the lyrics of Old Time music and being a history buff, that's always fascinating to me."
She said the beat of the music is appealing, noting, "It's just so danceable."
McCool said she is thankful she is able to play with her family.
"Oh we love it," she said. "Our whole family, my husband's family, was musical, they all played. I grew up in a family band traveling, so we've done this our whole lives, so when our kids came along it was never, you know, 'Are you going to play an instrument?' it was just, 'Which instrument are you going to play, what do you want to play, and what do we need in the band? We've already got one of these so, hey, would you like to banjo' kind of thing."
Playing with family also inspired the group's memorable band name.
"I coached my daughter's band for years and years, Twang, which is an all-girls spring band. They won all kinds of national awards. They started in the Music Roots program when they were in fourth grade and they went all the way through until, my daughter's in her freshman year at college now, but the year before that, two of the bandmates graduated, so they went all the way until 2020," McCool said, noting, "they're just like sisters."
Mary Parker, the fiddle player in Memaw's, was also in the group along with "two other girls."
"They all were in fifth grade and then got to be teenage girls, and I couldn't tell who was worse. Fourth-grade girls who just giggled about everything or, you know, teenage girls who were constantly talking about boys, and everything," McCool said.
"We'd have band practice," she said, "and every time I'd try to get a song going they'd be like 'Oh,' and then they'd go off on something else. And so a couple of parents, one in particular, he got to naming them, The Squirrel Chasers. because every time I'd be trying to get them to focus on something, they'd be off on something else and he'd say they were chasing squirrels again."
McCool was "the old woman of the group because I was the only one that wasn't in elementary school, and so they'd call me Memaw, they were always picking on me for being old, so that's how it was born," she said.
"We played one gig underneath that name and then that just kind of stuck, everybody started calling us Memaw and the Squirrel Chasers after that," she said.
This will also be a homecoming for McCool.
"I was born in Hot Springs, my mother's whole family is from Hot Springs. They lived over by Woodlawn, across from the racetrack and they used to have a big farm out on old Highway 5 towards Benton," she said.
"My mom went and graduated from Fountain Lake, so I'm familiar, really familiar with there," McCool said, noting she spent every summer in town when she was growing up.
"I'm excited to bring my daughter down there because she's not gotten to enjoy that as much as I did," she said.
"She hasn't gotten the chance to be as familiar with the things I grew up with, going to Mid-America and going to Magic Springs every stinking summer before Crystal Springs was ever a thought, all of those things that I grew up with -- going to Bathhouse Row. She never got to do any that," McCool said.
"She's hoping to get to do some of that this summer. I don't think we'll have as much chance to do it while we're there" this weekend, McCool said, because her daughter has to get back home quickly for college.