Month: January 2021

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Arts Culture

PICK: Sweet Honey in the Rock

Solidarity in song: Raising voices and raising awareness since 1973, Sweet Honey in the Rock is an African American a cappella group with a broad range of performance credits, from “Sesame Street” to Carnegie Hall. With mesmerizing harmonies and gifted lyrical flow, the ensemble addresses civil rights, justice, equality, and freedom through gospel, blues, and jazz. Sweet Honey celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a live streamed concert presented by the Charlottesville Jazz Society and Third Row Live. American Sign Language interpreter Barbara Hunt will accompany the singers.

Sunday 1/17, $15-50, 3 and 8pm. cvillejazz.org.

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Arts Culture

PICK: Jorma Kaukonen

Publicity Photo

Hot licks: It would be a disservice to call Jorma Kaukonen anything other than rock royalty. The Washington, D.C., native is on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists list. He’s a founding member of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, has performed with Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia, and still jams frequently with Phil Lesh. Kaukonen has kept busy during lockdown by streaming concerts with his folky friends and teaching workshops from his Ohio ranch. His virtual masterclass (intermediate level) on instrumental guitar supports The Front Porch.

Wednesday 1/13, $100, 7pm. Zoom required. 242-7012. frontporchville.org.

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Arts Culture

Life after life: Some Kind of Heaven retires the notion of easy living

TVisually beautiful and socially complicated, Some Kind of Heaven is a cinematic essay that begs for contemplation and digestion.

Whether they are willing to admit it or not, all documentaries make an argument. Michael Moore is never shy about voicing his opinions, while at the other end of the spectrum, Ken Burns frames his work as recording history. Some Kind of Heaven, the debut work from Lance Oppenheim, never shouts its thoughts from rooftops, but thanks to juxtaposition and keen editing, the message comes through.

The film premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it takes a look into the lives of four residents of The Villages in Florida. The Villages is the largest retirement community in the country, home to over 75,000 people, all looking for their own version of a twilight chapter. Some Kind of Heaven opens with idyllic shots of palm trees and golf carts, but as it allows us to get closer to a small handful of the residents, we see that even the gates of this gated community cannot keep reality from leaking in.

Anne and Reggie have been married for 47 years and are proud of it. She likes pickleball and keeping active, and he prefers more metaphysical pursuits. When we first meet them, she’s the uptight wife and he’s the quirky husband. But through closer inspection we see a much deeper portrait of their post-retirement life.

Barbara is younger than many of The Villages’ residents, and still needs to work full-time. She moved to Florida from Boston, reluctantly bringing both her husband and her strong accent, but was soon widowed and left trying to find her way in this strange place. She tries her best to get out and meet people, but the most gregarious we see her is when she is getting her hair done and chatting with a stylist.

And finally there’s Dennis. He lives in his van, which is often parked somewhere in The Villages, and relies on swimming pools for showers and hunting for mates. Dennis is very open about wanting to find a woman to support him financially, though as the film proceeds it becomes clear that he may not truly know what he wants.

The pivots in each character’s story never feel like a bait-and-switch, but rather a peek behind the curtains. For every person who claims The Villages is a utopia built in stucco, there’s another person hiding a struggle or lying to themselves. Especially when watching what Anne and Reggie are going through, it is difficult not to see every couple dancing across the screen (sometimes literally) as complicated—and not people who have it all figured out.

Cinematographer David Bolen brings a contemplative gaze to this curious world. The activities of the community, like a golf cart drill team and synchronized swimming, are filmed in vivid color with frequent symmetry, resembling the feel of idealized 1950s advertisements. These manufactured images are what sell people on The Villages, and they are what many of the residents want to believe their lives look like.

Oppenheim never goes so far as to shift Some Kind of Heaven into a rumination on loneliness or class disparity, but there are hints throughout that he’s building an argument to look beyond the surface. Dennis appears to be the same as his tanned, parrothead neighbors, however his intentions and personal history set him apart from many of the people he tries to connect with. And while it might seem that Barbara is doing her best to put herself out there, we see her literally out of sync at tambourine practice and staring, vacantly, off in the distance during her workday.

It is through these revelations that the documentary is constructed with intention. Oppenheim could have dug deeper to only show us the gritty underbelly of this Floridian dystopia. Instead, he creates a dialogue between perfection and defects, pleasure and discomfort, love and loneliness, movement and tranquility. The Villages is not one or the other, and Some Kind of Heaven looks at all of these angles.

This is not a documentary that aims to educate, proselytize, or sell, though in its own way it does all of that. It chooses which facets of this niche world to show you through remarkable access to the residents, and with a guiding hand that asks you to draw your own conclusions.

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Arts Culture

History repeats: Vinegar Hill ushers in Charlottesville Players Guild’s season

Terésa Dowell-Vest says the time is right for a revival of Vinegar Hill, a play she premiered at Live Arts in 1999 to honor the residents of Charlottesville’s razed Black neighborhood. 

Two decades ago, Terésa Dowell-Vest embarked on a research project. After attending grad school in California, the actor and playwright set out to collect the oral histories of family and community members in her hometown of Charlottesville. The product of this research was 1999’s Vinegar Hill, a play named after the town’s once-thriving Black neighborhood. Destroyed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal, Vinegar Hill and its former residents are memorialized in Dowell-Vest’s work.

Today, the play is part of Charlottesville history—but it’s about to return to center stage. The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s Charlottesville Players Guild, itself a revival of local Black theater, will kick off its 2021 Amplify season with a four-day symposium focused on Vinegar Hill. The symposium will be conducted virtually from January 15 to 18, and includes not just a reading of the play, but also a multimedia presentation of Vinegar Hill histories and a panel discussion about the neighborhood’s destruction.

The Vinegar Hill revival is a natural fit for Amplify’s opening event. All of Amplify’s productions in the 2021 season are the works of Black playwrights who either have roots in Charlottesville or who currently live and work in the city.

This is a break from traditional programming for the Guild—its 2017 revival featured a production of Fences, and programming has consistently included August Wilson’s work. But CPG’s artistic director, Leslie M. Scott-Jones, rejects the ideas of tradition and normalcy. “I don’t like the term ‘new normal,’ because there isn’t a normal,” she says, referring in part to the modified reality COVID has imposed on the world. “We have been conditioned to believe that there is a certain set of circumstances that constitute ‘normal.’”

Normalcy, Scott-Jones explains, is constantly in flux for artists, and especially for Black artists. “We are used to adjusting things about ourselves in order to survive,” she says. In order for the CPG to survive during the pandemic, programming has gone virtual—a shift that Scott-Jones says resulted in her decision to take a break from Wilson’s plays. “I didn’t want to lessen the impact of the work by doing it virtually.”

Dowell-Vest’s play will enjoy its first revival since its initial run at Live Arts. Although more than 20 years have passed, the playwright has clear memories of her preliminary research and what inspired her to start it. “I remember as a kid hearing my grandmother say, ‘It’s a shame what they did downtown,’” Dowell-Vest says. “That’s what I kept hearing over and over growing up.”

When she returned to Charlottesville in the late ’90s, it was as the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities’ first director of the African American Heritage Center. Dowell-Vest says she had always considered herself an artist and performer rather than a historian. In her new position, “I had tools…I had people who understood research.” She used these tools to delve further into the story of Vinegar Hill, to better comprehend the undercurrent of history that ran through her formative years in Charlottesville.

The project was a difficult and delicate one, Dowell-Vest explains. “People—Black, white, or otherwise—are very protective of their stories.” But through a combination of persistence and patience, Dowell-Vest was eventually able to collect enough stories about Vinegar Hill to fit them into a larger, dramatized narrative.

“I think I was reinvesting myself in my hometown,” she says of the project, as well as giving the city a “reminder” of the community it had physically torn down but failed to spiritually destroy. It’s time for another reminder, Dowell-Vest says.

She lives outside of Houston now, teaching at Prairie View A&M University, but visits Charlottesville occasionally (she’ll be here virtually for the Vinegar Hill discussion panel). Every time she returns, “Charlottesville looks completely different.” She attributes some of the change to “growth and evolution,” but also blames “greed, and sprawl, and decimating communities that have been generationally residential.”

Dowell-Vest sees the Vinegar Hill story played out again and again to varying degrees. She’s reviving her play, she says, to give “younger people context about where they are and the work that still needs to be done.”

Hailed as a local, modern classic, Vinegar Hill will be a hard act to follow. But Scott-Jones has a promising 2021 lineup—one that includes Thirty-Seven, a play of her own creation.

“I started writing it to answer a question for myself,” she says. “What makes a person, specifically a Black person, decide to become an activist?”

The title, she says, refers to the creation of the 9-1-1 emergency call in New York City, spurred by the murder of a Black woman outside her apartment building. “There were 37 people at home in her building who heard her calling for help and did nothing.”

Following Thirty-Seven is Ti Ames’ See About the Girls, a continuation of Amiri Baraka’s classic The Slave. David Vaughn Straughn’s Tanesha focuses on the videotaping of fatal police brutality against a Black person and the protagonist’s indecision about how to use the footage. Aiyana Marcus’ She Echoes on the Vine, the season’s closing play, is an exploration of one Black woman’s ancestry.

Although Scott-Jones is unsure which of these plays will be totally virtual and which might have live audiences—the season runs through November—she predicts Amplify will be a success, and a testament to the power of Black artists in Charlottesville. “[The plays] are all very different, but they’re all…telling the story of Black life,” she says. “I’m really hoping this season is a beacon for any other Black playwright out there.”

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News

None in the chamber: Charlottesville’s search for a city manager has gotten messy

City Council (pictured here last year) has held numerous closed sessions in recent weeks after a firm retained to find a new city manager declared the government dysfunctional. Photo: Eze Amos

One of the keys to stabilizing a floundering city government is to hire a strong and competent chief executive. But in order to attract a high-quality city manager, you need a government that isn’t floundering.

That’s the paradox facing the Charlottesville municipal government at this moment. In September, City Manager Tarron Richardson resigned after less than a year and a half on the job. Earlier this month, the hiring firm retained to find his replacement fled the scene as well, with the firm’s principal telling the city he had “never seen a level of dysfunction as profound as what he was seeing here,” according to a January 4 Facebook post from Councilor Lloyd Snook.

“The plan to stabilize the organization and begin to rebuild was to have John Blair as the interim for a few months, begin a recruitment process to hire a city manager, and go from there,” says Councilor Michael Payne.

But the recruitment firm couldn’t handle the situation in Charlottesville. “They were very candid in saying that the amount of instability made it impossible for them to feel like they could be effective in recruiting a high-quality city manager candidate,” Payne continues.

The situation got so bad that Snook wrote, “In my opinion, we will not be able to hire a permanent City Manager until after the next election, in November, 2021, and we should not try.” (The next council will take office in January 2022. Mayor Nikuyah Walker and Councilor Heather Hill’s terms end in December, though both could run for reelection.)

In the last two weeks, City Council has held three closed meetings to discuss topics including “one or more prospective candidates for employment or appointment to the position of city manager,” and, ominously, “the performance of one or more city councilors.”

(When Richardson resigned in September, the announcement came at the end of a series of long closed meetings to discuss “the performance of the city manager.”)

In an interview on Monday afternoon, at the end of a five-hour session, Vice-Mayor Sena Magill was cagey about council’s plans. “We all recognize that there is a lot of fear, and tension, and unease throughout both the city government and the city as a whole right now,” she says. “We’re working very diligently to look at as many opportunities as we can to solve that.”

Some of the turnover in city government over the last few years can be attributed to the fallout of 2017’s Unite the Right rally—the city manager, police chief, and communications director all departed in the months following August 2017.

Magill thinks the problems go deeper than that, however. “This is something that’s been growing. This isn’t a single issue. We’re not looking at issues that started in 2017,” says the vice-mayor. “We’re looking at growing and changing, and growing and changing is difficult and painful.”

Certainly, relationships between some council members seem strained.

In his January 4 Facebook post, Snook wrote that an email from Walker suggested to him that “the Mayor was going to not fully engage on the most important decision that we have as a Council—the selection of the City Manager,” and that the firm’s decision to bow out was “directly attributable to the dysfunction on Council, starting with the Mayor and her e-mail of December 10.”

Snook and Walker did not respond to a request for comment on this story, and Hill declined to comment, but Walker did post on Facebook the day after Snook’s initial post.

“I am tired of my white colleagues placing the blame for everything that goes wrong at my feet and using their fragility to excuse their cunning behavior and the cunning behavior of some staff and community members,” Walker wrote. “The title of the piece that I need to write – Charlottesville: The Mountaintop of White Supremacy.”

“The problem with the written word is there is no tone of voice,” says Magill when asked if she agrees with Snook’s assertion the currently seated council won’t be able to find a city manager. “We automatically hear tone of voice based on our experience with a person, or what state of mind we’re in when we read something. And that leads to misunderstanding.”

Some citizens have begun circulating a petition asking the council to bring Richardson back as city manager. In October, when he resigned, Richardson told C-VILLE “I’ve done my best, I’ve made a significant number of changes, and it’s time for me to move on.”

For now, Magill says more closed session discussions are on the horizon, and that the group of elected officials will continue working together to the best of their ability.

Payne doesn’t think the solution lies in waiting for another election, as Snook suggests, though admits turning things around won’t be easy. “Council has been having very candid, honest conversations about substantial things that need to change going forward,” he says. “I do think the situation has gotten bad enough where it’s going to take some time to get city government back to where it’s been in the past.”

 

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News

Back at it: Hudson, Deeds eye pandemic relief for General Assembly session

State Senator Creigh Deeds and Delegate Sally Hudson will prioritize criminal justice reform, expanded unemployment benefits, and school funding during the upcoming legislative session. PC: Photos courtesy subjects

By Geremia di Maro

Amid a surging number of COVID-19 cases in the state, and political turmoil at the national level, the Democrat-controlled Virginia General Assembly will convene Wednesday (remotely in the House) for the 2021 legislative session. Charlottesville’s local lawmakers have an ambitious agenda planned for the marathon 46-day session. Delegate Sally Hudson and state Senator Creigh Deeds will both prioritize criminal justice reform, expanded unemployment benefits amid the pandemic, and increased school funding, among other things.

Hudson plans to serve as the chief patron for seven bills in the House of Delegates, and said at a virtual town hall Sunday that each one represents one of her central lawmaking priorities. At a time when new COVID-19 cases continue to break daily records in Virginia—more than 5,700 new cases were reported January 9 alone—three of Hudson’s proposed bills aim to lower utility bill costs, prevent illegal evictions, and streamline unemployment benefits for Virginians beleaguered by the still-worsening pandemic.

“Unemployment payments are a crucial part of our social safety net and our economic recovery,” said Hudson on Sunday. “They ensure that—while there are a lot of people out of work and a lot of businesses that aren’t safe to operate—we can still continue to help all of our residents pay for rent and groceries and keep the wheels of our economy churning.”

More specifically, Hudson says her proposed bill would address some of the administrative hang-ups within the Virginia Employment Commission that have delayed the disbursement of benefits for as many as 70,000 Virginia residents this year. According to Hudson, 1.4 million people—or one in six Virginians—have applied for unemployment benefits during the past year.

On the Senate side, Deeds has related bills. He will propose that the state allocate $100 million to the Virginia Employment Commission for the purpose of providing long-term benefits for unemployed low-income and part-time workers. Deeds says these funds would come from a $650 million allocation to Virginia’s reserve fund proposed in Governor Ralph Northam’s budget.

“The reserve fund is somewhat supplementary to the constitutionally required rainy day fund, but in this pandemic, it’s raining on a whole lot of families,” says Deeds. “There have been people that have been thrown out of work because of the pandemic. [This proposal] is a one-time deal, for one year of funding, to provide long-term unemployment benefits for some of those people who have lost their job because of the pandemic.”

Hudson has also proposed a sweeping bill that would decriminalize the simple possession of any drug or controlled substance, meaning that the maximum penalty an individual could face for possessing a given substance would be a misdemeanor charge rather than a felony. The simple possession of marijuana was decriminalized by the General Assembly during the 2020 legislative session. Hudson says her long-term goal is for drugs to be completely decriminalized in Virginia, citing the state of Oregon as a model for how to go about the process.

“People who are struggling with substance abuse need economic support, they need jobs, they need connections to their community—they don’t need to be in cages,” says Hudson.

Also on her agenda: ending the abortion ban for those who receive health care from Virginia’s version of the ACA; retiring coal tax credits in an effort to incentivize green energy; repealing right to work laws; and prioritizing school funding when crafting the budget.

Hudson says she feels empowered and obligated to press forward on issues such as criminal justice reform in the General Assembly due to her district’s desire to see such changes.

“Charlottesville is continuing to push the leading edge of the conversation in Richmond, because I think what our constituents want is often a little further ahead than where Richmond is ready to go,” says Hudson.

Deeds, meanwhile, says one of his central legislative priorities is for the General Assembly to provide significant long-term funding for the modernization and  construction of schools across the commonwealth. Deeds hopes to fund the infrastructure upgrade through tax increases on wealthy Virginians. The plan is to raise taxes from 5.75 percent to 5.9 percent on income greater than $150,000 a year. The increase would generate about $134 million and $144 million in fiscal years 2021 and 2022, respectively.

The plan wouldn’t just fund schools, though. According to Deeds’ proposal, 45 percent of the new revenue would be devoted to schools, and 55 percent would be used to provide raises for deputy sheriffs officers throughout Virginia. Deeds says deputy sheriffs are tasked with law enforcement and many other duties in rural localities, but are often underpaid. After the General Assembly passed laws to raise training and conduct standards for officers during last year’s special session, Deeds says the pay increase for these officers is appropriate.

“I’m interested in coming up with a sustainable source of funding because I think it’ll take pressure off where we’ve got a well-documented need,” says Deeds about the schools portion of his bill. “If we’re serious about providing opportunity through our public school system, we ought to be serious about making sure we provide that opportunity.”

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News

On the rise: Police chief calls on community to take action against gun violence

In light of a recent increase in local shootings, Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney held a press conference to call for the community to help prevent future acts of violence. PC: City of Charlottesville

Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney held a press conference Thursday afternoon to address what the department is calling an “unprecedented” rise in gun violence in the city. There have been eight incidents since November 5, a period that caps off a year in which police responded to 122 reports of shots being fired.

There were four gun homicides in 2020, a notable rise from the two homicides in 2019 and one in 2018.

“I’m calling on community advocates, influencers, organizers to go beyond Twitter or Instagram, Facebook, your news interviews, podcasts, or social media mediums to leverage your collective resources,” said Brackney at the press conference. “This cannot be laid solely as a burden at the police department’s feet…We cannot arrest our way out of this.”

The rise in gun violence has continued into 2021—last week, two shootings occurred near apartment buildings on Sixth Street SE and Prospect Avenue, in addition to a shooting in the middle of Emmet Street near Hydraulic Road.

“In one of those apartments, a woman lay in her bed and a bullet traveled right through her mattress and another woman was struck in the forehead,” said Assistant Police Chief Jim Mooney. “These are innocent victims that have nothing to do with whatever is causing this, and it has to end.”

Some people involved in the recent shootings lived outside of Charlottesville, but still had connections to the city, explained Brackney. The violence cannot be called an “outside” problem, or tied to a specific group or person.

While the department has made arrests for three of the four homicides from last year, as well as other shootings, Brackney emphasized the limits of policing.

“We understand the drivers of long-term systemic violence…to include poverty [and] exclusion from education and living wage opportunities. We understand institutional supremacy and racism, and its effects,” said Brackney. “We’re trying to stop the next act before it occurs. That takes more than just proactive police work, that takes community involvement.”

Brackney also pointed to the “breakdown in systems” caused by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as a potential reason behind the uptick in gun violence.

Though Brackney acknowledged that some community leaders may be working behind the scenes, she also claimed they have been “completely silent on these issues” and needed to get involved publicly, such as by offering jobs, tutoring, mentorship, health care, therapy, and other critical needs.

“Get in contact with me,” she said. “We will coordinate the resources with you.”

Since the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement last year, community activists have been calling for budget adjustments to police funding. On Thursday, Brackney also suggested the city use its budget—which currently allocates $18 million a year to the police department—to take meaningful action.

“We’re going into budget season. What does our budget look like to address community drivers of violence?” she said. “The city has a responsibility to consider the budget allocations of every department to address community and social priorities as we provide social safety services.”

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In brief: Vaccines for the frontline, Wade for City Council, and more

PC: Eze Amos

Vaccine scene

Charlottesville Fire Department Captain Lance Blakey was the first to receive a coronavirus vaccine at the Blue Ridge Health District’s new vaccination facility in the Kmart parking lot last week. The city continues to move through phase 1A of vaccinations, which includes doctors, nurses, EMTs, pharmacists, social workers, and other frontline health care personnel. As of Tuesday morning, 9.2 million doses of the vaccine had been distributed in the U.S. In Virginia, 191,000 people have received their first shot, and 15,000 of those people have also gotten a second shot, which is administered around a month after the first. Virginia ranks 36th out of 50 states in the percent of the population that has been vaccinated, according to The New York Times. So far, 3,893 Albemarle County residents have been vaccinated, and 3,643 Charlottesville City residents have been vaccinated.

Freshman lawmaker Bob Good is facing calls to resign after voting to contest the 2020 presidential election. PC: Publicity photo

Off to a no-Good start

That was fast: Bob Good has been in congress for less than two weeks, and he’s already facing calls to resign. The Republican was one of the members of the House of Representatives who voted last week to formally contest the results of the 2020 presidential election in six states. That vote came on the heels of Wednesday’s deadly attack on the Capitol—later, when Democrats began the process of impeaching President Trump for his role in the insurrection, Good released a statement calling the effort “destabilizing and offensive.”

Indivisible Charlottesville held a rally outside the county office building on Friday, calling for Good to step down after his vote to contest the election. And last week, the editorial board at the Danville Register & Bee penned an op-ed to the same effect. “We hope you have taken time to watch the video of how Wednesday unfolded,” the board writes. “We hope guilt has seared a hole in your soul.”

_________________

Quote of the week

“All of the people surprised by the events of yesterday live
outside of Charlottesville. I promise you, we knew.“

—Activist Don Gathers in a tweet about the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol

__________________

In brief

Home schooling

The Charlottesville school board voted last week to postpone in-person classes until at least March 8. Earlier in the winter, the district had hoped to return to in-person learning as early as January 19, but moved the start date back as local COVID cases continue to rise. Albemarle’s school board will meet this week to make a decision on how to handle the next few weeks.

Chased out?

Virginia state Senator and 2021 gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase was among the seditionists on the scene at the Capitol attack last week. Soon after, the Virginia Senate’s Democratic Caucus called on Chase to resign, saying she “galvanized domestic terrorists.” Many Republicans are sick of Chase, too—former Republican representative Barbara Comstock was among a handful who called on the Virginia General Assembly to expel the lawless lawmaker.

Virginia state Senator Amanda Chase joined the march to the U.S. Capitol that resulted in a riot last week. PC: Publicity photo

Vaccines for inmates

Virginia announced last week that people in state prisons and local jails would be included in Phase 1B of COVID vaccinations. The decision was praised by justice reform advocates who have watched with horror as correctional facilities around the nation have become COVID hot spots. Phase 1b also includes people aged 75 or older and frontline workers like firefighters and K-12 teachers.

Wading in

Charlottesville City School Board member Juandiego Wade announced that he’s running for City Council this year. Wade, a school board member since 2006, was awarded the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Paul Goodloe McIntire Citizenship Award in 2019. Certainly, it takes a person with real character to run for council after watching how city government has worked for the last few years.

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Arts Culture

PICK: Labryrinth

David Bowie stars as Jareth the Goblin King in the 1986 film Labyrinth. Tristar Pictures.

Birthday Bowie: In the mid-’80s, a Jim Henson and George Lucas film collaboration was guaranteed to generate big buzz—tack on the casting of rock star/actor David Bowie, and the anticipation was palpable. The musical fantasy Labyrinth follows the journey of a teenage girl through a maze to rescue her baby brother. Other than Bowie and lead actress Jennifer Connelly, the film is cast mainly
with puppets, and it was a bust at the box office before growing into a cult classic (and a way to commemorate the singer’s January 8 birthday) over the past three decades.

Saturday 1/9. $5-8, 3 and 7pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 979-1333. theparamount.net.

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Arts Culture

PICK: The Earlysville Bluegrass Boys

The Earlysville Bluegrass Boys play to Save the Music in The Front Porch series. Publicity image.

Band of brothers: With a sound beyond their years, you’d never guess that the Heetderks brothers are all under age 17. Picking out traditional bluegrass and gospel as The Earlysville Bluegrass Boys, David (banjo, dobro), John (mandolin, fiddle), and Daniel (guitar, bass) have made a name for themselves by charming audiences at church picnics and on CPA-TV’s “Blue Ridge Barn Dance.” The Boys recent Christmas countdown on Facebook captured their talent through originals, standards, and a wild reworking of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” The trio’s appearance on the virtual Save the Music series will benefit Meals on Wheels of Charlottesville/Albemarle. 

Wednesday 1/6. Donations accepted, 8pm. facebook.com/frontporchcville.