Discover and Celebrate the Bliss of Asheville's Street Entertainment

During Bele Chere, downtown Asheville turns into one giant street festival which celebrates the wide variety of music and entertainment that is part of the culture and tradition of Asheville and Western North Carolina. Much of Bele Cher's music and entertainment is sponsored and scheduled, but some of it is a spontaneous, unscheduled expression of genuine celebration and joy by individuals and small groups. Throughout the year, there are also many such spontaneous "unsponsored" muscial celebrations: some are regular, like the Friday night drum circle in Pritchard Park... and some are more sporadic, like the guitar players, or old-time Blue Grass fiddlers, or drummers... which you frequently encounter while walking through downtown Asheville, day or night, or even shopping at the Westgate Earthfare Natural Foodstore.

Thanks to the power of YouTube, and the generous sharing of some of Asheville citizens, or perhaps visitors, we are able to bring you actual videos of these spontaneous street entertainers. Enjoy!

Four women discovered in downtown Asheville, NC on a Sunday afternoon enjoying playins some oldtime Appalachian fiddle music.

Click on each of the dozens of categories to the left to uncover what makes the Asheville area so vital, so intriguing and so, well, UTTERLY BLISSFUL!

From Rolf Potts' Vagabonding blog:

I've never been one of those uptight literary types who thinks that you have to have actually read a book in order to recommend it to others. So I feel no trepidation in suggesting Eric Weiner's new travelogue-slash-memoir The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World The premise of the book is simple but intriguing-- here is Amazon's description:

Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness." The book uses a beguiling mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Singapore benefit psychologically by having their options limited by the government? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? With engaging wit and surprising insights, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.

In the imaginary Netflix queue of books-that-I'm-planning-to-read, this one has just jumped to the top. By the way, why has no one started a Netflix for books? This question, and many more, I'll leave for another day.

Steel Drummer on the Corner of Lexington and Walnut in the Historic Lexington Park District of Asheville