You can call him Jesco.
You can call him Elvis.
My life was forever changed the day I saw the documentary The Dancing Outlaw. My family had just moved to Charleston, West Virginia from Southern California. I'll be honest here. I didn't really know that much about West Virginia. I was stuck in a West Coast bubble. I was 12 and innocent to pretty much anything not bordering the Pacific Ocean. So it should come to no surprise that when I was younger I also thought such things like everyone was Catholic and the only college football teams were in Pac Ten (So what if I still think this is true?). So when we moved to West Virginia I was in for a little bit of a culture shock. I wasn't really sure where we were going, but I knew it would be a little different. To prepare for the move my dad printed off some pages from our encyclopedia that at the time was stored on fancy CD-rom. To the best of my memory the print out mentioned nothing of hillbillies or race relations or maybe I just didn't understand such things at the time?
Once I got there I knew this was not the place for me. I didn't want to start school (I took the entire first month of 8th grade off) and I spent that first month doing a lot of shopping and hanging out with my mom and her best friend, Jane. Jane was a friend my parents knew from the 70's and who also happened to be a native West Virginian. During that month we watched Tommy Boy (Jane's favorite) and she shared with us her passed down VHS of the Dancing Outlaw documentary. I had never seen anything like it before. I was in awe that Jane had even hired Jesco to "play" at her neighborhood block party. Literally, she pulled out a $20 and he rocked for her party. This documentary was pretty well known and shared among friends. If you haven't seen it you are missing out.
So, a week or so ago I found out Jesco White would be "performing" at a local venue. Immediately I contacted my friends and everyone was in. Some had been at the show where he opened up for the Black Keys and some had literally just seen the Dancing Outlaw documentary at my place. Everyone was in. I also mentioned it to a few other friends and it appears there is a lot of interest in the Dancing Outlaw. So much interest that we are holding another viewing party for the documentary before the show.
In case you couldn't tell, I can not wait for this!
I leave you with this. Possibly one of the most red neck things ever to grace this blog. A picture of a picture. But not just any picture. A picture of Jesco White to Jane from Jesco that Jane taped to a another picture in her house.
