The Octagon Earthworks in Newark, Ohio.
I'll be performing a solo set of vintage and recent songs by my very self, which should be good because I've been practicing. Then, to elevate things a bit, I'll be joined my my wife and partner in musical crime, Alison Davy, in a pocket version of my musical South.
So, some details. First, the earthworks.
I grew up in Newark in the 1970's and the earthworks to me were just a park out by the mall where you could go picnicking. The park is called "Moundbuilders", so we called them "the mounds", earthworks came later. I don't recall that they were thought to be important. For instance, I don't recall much mention of them in school, nor ever taking a field trip. The first time I registered them was when my next door neighbor, an architect named Don Gunnerson, designed a flag for the area designating our county "The Land of Legend". It was a schematic of the octagon mounds, which happens to be the site of a local golf course. I recall an event one summer with a faux Native-American re-enactment of something or other with Cherokee head dressings and ceremonial dancing by what had to have been Eagle Scouts. The performers were digging into the side of a very large mound. I'm not sure about the story but a flashpot went off, which was great. I think around this time I got the impression that they were burial mounds, I imagined dense heaps of Indian bones covered by a thin layer of dirt with golf carts driving over them; I figured they had to leave them there because it was a cemetery.
In my twenties during one particular streak of what I perceived to be misfortune, I hit upon the idea that anything bad that happened in Newark - or even to somebody raised in Newark - was because the country club built their golf course on an ancient Indian burial site and that we were all cursed, like in the movie Poltergeist.
In recent years I've learned that the earthworks are the remains of a civilization referred to by archeologists as the Hopewell culture. They flourished from 100 BC to 400 AD. This would be prior to Native North Americans as we generally think of them. A small portion of the four square mile Newark Earthworks complex was used for burials, but most of it was not. The Octagon may have relationships to seasonal positioning of stars, maybe a calendar, like Stonehenge? In a funny twist, many earthworks in the state were flattened out and built atop over the years; the country club probably kept the Octagon intact which I hope will remove or at least mitigate the curse.
In any case, I get to play there August 12. I think it will be a fun gig for everyone. I'll see if I can get another blog about the music.
