WELCOME
… to the official website of Sharon Leahy & Rick Good
Original Creations & Living Traditions
DANCE, MUSIC, THEATER & MORE
The creative team of Leahy & Good began making art in the mid-1980s and has proven through the course of the past twenty-five years to be prolific, eclectic, inspiring and entertaining.
Represented here is our work as individuals, as a duo, and in ensembles like ShoeFly and Good ‘n’ Young. Also included is content which can no longer be found on the former Rhythm in Shoes website at www.rhythminshoes.org.
WHAT’S HAPPENING?
ShoeFly is looking forward to some action this February. In addition to gigs in Newark and Circleville, Ohio, the band will be traveling down to Memphis for the 2012 Folk Alliance Conference. (See the CALENDAR page for details.) It will be our first FAI Conference. In addition to a lot of networking and gig-wrangling, there’ll be late night showcases where we’ll be putting on a show in case anybody wants to see us.
LeahyGood will perform three times on Friday.
• Anderson Fair in-the-round Room #1826 – 2:00 pm
• Access Film Music Red Room #1914 – 11:30 pm
• Hootenanny Hall Room #1808 – 1:30 am
ShoeFly will perform three times on Saturday Night.
• Access Film Music Green Room #1716 – 11:00 pm
• Hazel Dickens Room #1905 – 12:00 am
• Troubador Room #1809 – 1:30 am
Come and see us if you’re going to the Conference!
Pre-production work has begun for our next collaboration with Zoot Theatre Company. Since our first joint effort with Dayton’s fine mask and puppet company (a haunting and hard-hitting production of The Tragedy of Hansel and Gretel), we have been looking forward to working with Zoot again. This time around Sharon will be directing The Pearl by John Steinbeck. A powerful tale of human greed, this production is sure to be both timely and top notch. Make plans to see The Pearl in the Mathile Theater at the Schuster Performing Arts Center in Dayton, April 12 – 14.
WHAT JUST HAPPENED?
The Wednesday night old time acoustic jam at the Trolley Stop in Dayton featured a special appearance on December 21st by ShoeFly and Good ‘n’ Young. An enthusiastic tavern full of music lovers got their fill of great music and good beer, always a fine combination.
BLACK POT FESTIVAL
The 5th Annual South Louisiana Black Pot Festival & Cookoff took place in October in Lafayette, Louisiana. Conceived and produced by the Red Stick Ramblers and a loose cooperative of South Louisiana musicians, artists and southern culture enthusiasts, Black Pot is two days of music, dancing, food, camping and jamming, complete with an old-fashioned black pot cookoff and accordion contest.
photo by George Touchstone
Our family band, Good ‘n’ Young played a rousing set of old time songs and tunes on the Black Pot Chapel Stage Saturday afternoon. Pictured above from left to right are Linzay Young, Rick Good, Sharon Leahy, Emma Young. Emma and Sharon ended the set with some freestyle clogging that brought the SRO audience to their feet.
Later that night, the first ever Flash Clog ambushed the main dance floor with six renegade cloggers. Their four minutes of ferociously flying feet left the unsuspecting crowd nearly hyperventilating in a primal frenzy. Dancers included Sharon Leahy, Emma Young, Kelli Jones, Clelia Stefanini, Becky Hill and Kristin Andreassen.
Beware the Flash Clog. No one knows where it may strike next.
SUMMER, 2011
Way back in May, anybody who told us to have a good summer can rest assured that’s just what we did.
Like most of our summers lately, it all started in early June at the annual Mt. Airy Bluegrass & Old-Time Fiddlers Convention in North Carolina. A month later we flew across the country to Port Townsend, Washington for the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, then it was back to North Carolina for the Swannanoa Gathering, near Black Mountain. August began in West Virginia at the annual Appalachian Stringband Music Festival, followed by a familiar trip northward to upstate New York for Southern Week at Ashokan. Here are some of the highlights:
MOUNT AIRY
Home to the classic “Round Peak” style of oldtime music, Mount Airy has long been a mecca for fiddlers and banjo players. Like nearby Galax, Virginia, it’s a place aspiring players of traditional music can go to drink from the well that watered the roots.
photo by Jack McGee
This year’s final evening was even more memorable than usual, as we picked and partied till the morning sun was high in the sky, celebrating the birth back home of our fourth grandchild, Tallulah Clare Cole, daughter of Canaan Good and Darren Cole. Pictured below, just two months later, Tallulah is listening to her first Tommy Jarrell tunes.
Welcome Tallulah!
FIDDLE TUNES
Port Townsend, Washington is a picturesque village on the banks Puget Sound. The community’s vibrant cultural life is enriched annually by a series of events which take place at old Fort Worden, among them, the annual Festival of American Fiddle Tunes.
It was a great pleasure to team up with our good friend Alice Gerrard for our first trip to Fiddle Tunes. Harmonizing with Alice is heart-warming joy and her repertoire of oldtime tunes is wonderfully unique. Pictured below, performing with the three of us, is Eric Thompson on guitar, Sammy Lind on fiddle and Nadine Landry (sadly obscured) on bass.
photo by Grace Forest
It was a solid week of classes, dances, jam sessions and song swaps that covered several traditions as they are played in this country including Mexican, Scandinavian, Canadian, Cajun and Appalachian.
Among the many fine musicians we discovered for the first time was Kentucky fiddler, Paul David Smith. His playing was a beautiful balance of tradition and elegance, and we were fortunate enough to cross paths with him again at our very next camp.
SWANNANOA
Nestled in the Carolina highlands is the lovely campus of Warren Wilson College, home to the Swannanoa Gathering. This series of week long, summer programs goes a long way towards keeping the rich and varied traditions of southern culture alive and well.
photo by R.L. Geyer
After hearing about it from friends for so long we were happy to finally join them on the staff of Old Time Week for a truly great all around experience. Great classes, rousing performances, fun dances, excellent music, fantastic company… what more can we say?
One memorable jam session began with the inimitable Paul Brown on fiddle and ended with the aforementioned Paul David Smith. In light of Paul David’s recent passing, we are particularly thankful for the opportunity to spend some quality time making music with him. He was a fine musician with a gentle soul and he will be missed.
CLIFFTOP
Every August, deep in the woods of West Virginia’s Babcock State Park, Camp Washington Carver becomes a small city of campers, tents, tarps and trailers for ten days and nights of the best old time music being played today.
There, at the Appalachian Stringband Music Festival, better known as Clifftop, the grand old tradition of fiddlers’ conventions is thriving as top players from across the country perform their best for cash prizes and colored ribbons in fiddle, banjo, stringband and flatfoot dancing competitions.
For the past fifteen years, Clifftop has been our annual retreat and we’ve accumulated more than two dozen of those pretty ribbons playing the banjo, flatfoot dancing and holding forth in both the traditional and alternative band categories with our ever-changing confederation of friends and relatives performing as The Yeah Buddies.
photo by Gary Hamilton
This year, just eleven days after his 60th birthday, Rick took first place in the Senior category of the oldtime banjo contest and Sharon, pictured above dancing in the competition, brought home yet another ribbon for flatfooting the oldtime way.
ROOT CAMP
Our long time friends Jay Ungar & Molly Mason have been hosting music and dance camps in the woods of upstate New York since the 1980′s. Except for a couple of years here and there, we’ve been a part of the teaching staff at Ashokan Fiddle & Dance Camp Southern Week every summer.
Just a stone’s throw from the Ashokan Reservoir, the secluded camp is a genuine retreat from the myriad stresses of modern life. Add to that the joy of oldtime music and dance, plus the atmosphere of peace and love so warmly fostered by Jay & Molly, and you’ve got what we call Root Camp at Ashokan.
So, there you have it. That’s what we’re talking about when we say, “It was a great summer!”
Watch and hear video clips of Sharon’s and Rick’s work from the vast and varied repertoire of Rhythm in Shoes, now accessible and ever expanding on the LeahyGood YouTube channel, as well as this site’s VIDEO page.