Barking Cherry done barking

It's a shame to further rain on what is already a fairly gloomy period for Charlottesville music, but prior email inquiries about this one apparently went missing for a while:

The Barking Cherry House Concerts run by local songwriter Len Jaffe and his partner Ginny Gubser have come to an end after the pair parted company for personal reasons. For four years, the Barking Cherry series hosted quiet early-evening acoustic shows in a private home from folk songwriter types like Taylor Pie and Bill Staines–- the latter of whom sold out four times. Jaffe pulled the plug on the remainder of this year's season in a note to his email list last month.

Checking in from his new digs in Richmond via email:

We had a good time doing the shows for the four years, but I felt that it never found a connection to the local music scene at large. Why we couldn't get 35 people in chairs for almost every show when I know there is an audience for acoustic music in Charlottesville is beyond my understanding. I also felt we never connected to the existing music community, either. For the most part, we were ignored. Had we gone ahead with this season and got little more response that we had previously, it would have been our last, anyway.

Some of this same frustration also turned up in Jaffe's impassioned memorial guest essay in the Daily Progress after Gravity Lounge was forced to close in April, but overall he may have had the best response of all to the recent problem of waning music venues: taking matters into his own hands.