Event
Play Music on the Porch
Fee:
Free.Dates & Times
Date:
Time:
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Type of Event
Description
Appomattox Court House National Historic Park is participating in Play Music on the Porch Day! Come join us on Saturday, August 30 from 1-4 PM to listen to and/or play songs on the Clover Hill Tavern porch. Bring your own instrument if you’d like to join in!
Play Music on the Porch Day is an international celebration of music as a universal way to connect people and create peace. Appomattox Court House NHP is both a site of peace - with the meeting between General U.S. Grant and R. E. Lee that marked the beginning of the end of the American Civil War- AND a place of music where for over 300 years the music has rung out from all over the countryside here.
In fact, Joel Sweeney, a resident of Appomattox County, helped popularize the banjo, took the idea of the stringed "banjar" - a gourd-bodied string instrument - and developed it into the basic modern 5-string banjo. From his earliest days as a boy he loved and learned the African-based music brought to North America by the enslaved. Joel and his siblings, Sampson, Richard, and sister Missouri, were leaders in developing minstrel music and became so popular that they toured in Europe.