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Fall 1999ARTICLES
COLUMNS
TUNES
ARTICLE EXCERPTS
Benny Martin: The Genius of Music City, USAby John HartfordI first heard Benny Martin with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs in the early fifties and his playing opened up a whole new world to me of how the fiddle should go. I had grown up on regular old breakdown fiddling and had even played a dance or two at the tender age of fourteen or fifteen, but one morning, local St. Louis country music disc jockey Roy Queen played "Dear Old Dixie" on his radio show and when that banjo and fiddle came punching out of the radio speaker I had next to my bed, I literally fell out on the floor. The banjo sounded so clear and electric that at first I didn't realize that it was a banjo. But then in an instant it very much was, and more like the true meaning of a banjo. Whoever was playing the fiddle played these beautiful lush chords and slides that just hugged and danced and got up all around me and before the music was over I was bouncing off the walls when I should have been getting ready for school. I couldn't get these sounds out of my mind and I'm sure I wasn't worth a flip for studying that day. I was bad to sit and daydream in school anyway and many times when I could hear the wind in the trees outside the classroom window, it sounded like fiddles and banjos off in the distance somewhere, and I then couldn't even begin to be able to concentrate on what was happening up on the blackboard The next morning on the radio, Roy Queen announced that Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, the guys who had played "Dear Old Dixie," would be appearing at his Hillbilly Park at Chain of Rocks up on the banks of the Mississippi River that coming Sunday afternoon and then he proceeded to play the "Flint Hill Special" (the original of which, to this day, is my favorite phonograph record of all time) and this time I think I might have been actually trying to climb inside the radio. The banjo was stabbing me with brilliant bright spikes of light that perfectly connected with one another and the fiddle was answering in long screams of brilliant brownish-red tones that ran all up and down my spine and it was like being in a model A Ford truck going hell bent for leather down a crooked mountain road with no brakes whatsoever on a beautiful sunny day and nobody gives a damn for nothingthe freest, most exciting music I had ever heard. I was not quite old enough to drive in June of 1953, so I conned my mother into taking Walter Metcalfe, a neighbor boy, and me up to Chain of Rocks, and when that band walked out on that stage with those two-tone shoes, hats, and short "saw blade" ties and Benny Martin cut down on "Gray Eagle," I know now, that right then my life changed forever. This is weird, but Earl reminded me of my Uncle Bill, and Benny, the first time I saw him, I thought he looked like some kind of a gangster. He was absolutely amazing; his fiddle was like an extension of his arms. He played with his whole body. I was thunderstruck. There was so much going on that I have been the rest of my life grasping it all. It was the beginning of a hopeless addiction. I was caught up in the passion of the moment. How many times I've wished I could go back to that moment knowing what I know now. It was the combination of Earl and Benny together and the offhanded casual way they approached the music. I remember Earl's banjo case laid out flat on the ground under a tree and I asked him what he had on his fingers and he showed me his finger picks. In the weeks, months, and years that followed, I experienced a hero worship much like the way young boys emulate baseball players and a disproportionate amount of my time was spent trying to pick a banjo like Earl and imitating Benny when I played my fiddle. In spite of having previously chosen a career working on the river, all else fell into second place. As the years went by, Benny left Lester and Earl and was with Johnny and Jack and then on his own as a member of the Grand Ole Opry. I followed him wherever I could and listened to him as closely as I could. If I heard he was gonna play somewhere I tried to be there. I collected his records and tried to work out my imitations of his fiddling. I had met Gene Goforth, who was the main man around that part of the country in those days, and we had started playing together and I must give him credit for honing my taste and skills in old time fiddling more than anyone. Gene was like me he was a Benny Martin fanatic and so many a night, Gene and I would sit up working on and trying to get that Benny Martin sound and feeling. I always felt that Gene had more of a handle on it than I did, so I learned a lot about Benny from Gene. By and by in later years, I found myself a full-time professional musician and I got to know Benny and Earl and was able to learn from them firsthand, things that had eluded me in years past. Benny is not a natural teacher in the way that we think of teachers. He's just too passionate and too busy doing it to be like that. So much of what he does comes so naturally. The way to learn from him directly is to just pay real close attention and try to imitate him. So much of what he does he does by instinct and a lot of learning how he does it is learning to do it by instinct. Benny plays hard with a tremendous amount of dynamics and phrasing and with as much emotion as I have ever heard any one human being put into music. Fiddle transcriptions don't do him justice, although we have done some here anyway. Lester Flatt told me one time that when Benny first got a fiddle and bow and started trying to play up there where he grew up in Craig Rock, you could hear him all over his hometown of Sparta, Tennessee. He had such a natural gift that when he was young and playing with all the local bands, people for miles around would try and keep track of where he was playing, and come and hear him. It was natural that at a young age he would wind up in Nashville playing first with Big Jeff and his Radio Playboys for Hadachol over WLAC and then later with Curly Fox, Milton Estes, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, and then Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Benny was able to play recording studio quality guitar as well as fiddle and had a singing style that was to be copied and recopied by lots of mainstream country music performers. He had a stage style that predated and predicted Rock and Roll and has been imitated by many who I will not name other than to admit myself as another imitator. He is one of the great country music songwriters: "If I Can Stay Away Long Enough" (Hank Cochran told us one night that after Benny wrote that, there was nothing left to write), "Ice Cold Love," "Me and My Fiddle," "I Can Read Between the Lines," "Where Is Your Heart Tonight," "The Story of My Life," and on and on. This is interesting in that there has been a lot bandied about lately about great artists who are overloaded in one particular area of talent seem to not be very well endowed in others, a note that seems not to be true in Benny's case. A dark note here, Benny was on his way to being a household country music name like Hank Williams, who he was close to in those days, but like many geniuses he had his crazy streak and was prone to substance abuse, mostly alcohol. Somehow he lived through it but never got the fame he deserved. Maybe it worked out for the best, for if he had become more famous than he did he might not have survived as long as he has and kept working. He still writes and thinks and works on his art every day, and is now in his seventies. If you will excuse, me, I'm now very close to him so I can't really write objectively about this side of him (and don't really want to). Benny holds the bow like many old time fiddlers, with his thumb under the frog, and plays with what looks like every inch of the bow, and when he's not bowing and if he's singing he'll be strumming the fiddle like a ukulele with his thumb and then right before he's gonna play again, he'll tweak the frog screw a little or knock the bow lightly against his pant's leg to adjust the amount of rosin powder before starting that mighty down bow he has. For years he has done most of his own repair work and haired his own bows until he felt his eyes were not right. When he handles a fiddle it is with a tremendous amount of authority. If he picks up a bow he will immediately check the spread and consistency of the hair and if it doesn't suit him he will take out the frog screw, pull up the stick, and fix it to suit him, all with lightning speed, and movements like a cat. He will take the bow and pull it over the peg head of the fiddle and announce to you what key that fiddle is in, something I have never seen anyone else ever do. Benny's fingering generally stays away from using his pinky on his left hand. I have read that Fritz Kreisler and Pablo Casals played that way so the little finger would stay away from the power notes, particularly those ending notes you want to sustain. Benny has tremendously powerful double stops and is known for pioneering the use of parallel fifths in old time fiddling. He's told me many times that fiddling is all in the bow and that he'd rather have a great bow and a mediocre fiddle than the other way around. His bow licks, timing and syncopations are the key to what he's doing. I think he underestimates what he does with his left hand. His selection of notes to describe the melodies he's playing is totally his own and it's hard to hear them any other way once you've heard his setting. His accenting and slides are very important, his way of pushing the beat ever so slightly for energy (an old Foggy Mountain Boy trick), his bow sometimes almost playing (would you believe?) a rhumba beat. Benny was the first I ever knew to put eight strings on a fiddle and tune it like a steel guitar. You can hear this on some of his recordings like "Hobo" and "Me and My Fiddle." He hates to play without a bass, or "boom boom" as he calls it, and considers good second to be of extreme importance. Sometimes he'll have me play the fiddle and he'll pick guitar behind me and pushes me so hard that I almost can't play, but when I hear it back on tape it will be way more on target than I could ever have believed I could do. Between tunes he is a world class storyteller, but in recent years he has lost his voice and is hard to understand. I can usually get what he is trying to say in context but at this time I think he would be hard to interview. I have gone over this article with him and we've added and subtracted a few things to get them right. He has a new CD-ROM just released on the Original Music Showcase label called The Big Tiger Roars Again! Part One, which I call your attention to because on the ROM part of it are some videos of Benny playing the fiddle in the fifties when he was in his prime, and one segment is slowed down and if you study it, it is not only the text book on Benny's bow but may be the text book on the long bow itself. Also, the liner notes are a good autobiographical look at Benny's life. ... [John Hartford has been a professional fiddler, banjo player and songwriter for over thirty years. For more information, see John's website at http://www.techpublishing.com/hartford/] [Original Music Showcase Records: omsrecords.com]
Cape Breton's Carl MacKenzieBy Peter MartenCarl MacKenzie of Washabuch, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, plays with the driving enthusiasm that we have come to take for granted in Cape Breton fiddling. He has also made a name for himself as an expressive and perceptive fiddler who obtains a sweet sound from the instrument. Words like "magic" and "soul" often appear in descriptions of Carl's playing, and are confirmed by the material on his CDs Cape Breton Fiddle Medleys and Highland Dance Fiddle, and his numerous records. He has traveled widely in North America and abroad, giving concerts and conducting workshops. Fiddler Magazine had the chance to talk with him after one such workshop at Boston College's Gaelic Roots festival in June 1998. How old were you when you started playing? I tried to play when I was nine or ten, I suppose, and gave it up because I wasn't approaching it the right way or something. But then when I was about twelve years old, I started and I learned. I had no teacher; my older brothers played, but in that day and age, you sort of just learned on your own. I don't know why; you just picked it up and you learned it. You watched other people, what they were doing. The first tune I learned was called "The 42nd Highlander's" [lilts the first few bars]. And I was always told that if you get one tune, no matter how simple it is, then that's it, you've then got the idea of it down and you just learn another tune, learn another tune. And that's basically about the way it went. Who were you listening to when you learned your first tunes? Well, I was lucky in a sense; my older brother could read music and he would be going through the books. And at that time I could pick up a tune very quickly by listening to it and have it in my head, and then it's just a matter of learning to play it. So, there was never any problem with learning tunes, because there's always lots of tunes. How were fiddlers regarded in the community when you were growing up? There were certain people in the community that you would really look up to. One was your clergyman; that has changed somewhat in the last while. And your doctor; well, I suppose your doctor's still looked up to by some, but not as much. And a fiddler; if you played the fiddle reasonably well, you were almost like a kind of a god. And if you played it really well like [Winston] "Scotty" Fitzgerald or something like that, wellEven if I played the fiddle, I wouldn't dare play the fiddle if some of these people were around even when I was getting kind of good at it because they were so much better and you just wouldn't waste the time by taking the time from them. But fiddlers were very much appreciated, probably more so than they are today. Like any style, Cape Breton fiddling has certain intangible characteristics. Is it possible to describe in words the "lift" that Cape Bretoners put into a tune? Well, a lot of it is done with the bow, and it has to do with giving more value to certain notes. Maybe a hesitation or emphasis on a note; you can emphasize it by playing a little louder, or a little more forcefully, or embellishing it with special grace notes. Giving it a certain emphasis with the bow instead of just bowing up and down, sometimes doing two or three up-bows in a row, and then you can come down with a real strong down-bow. It gives the tune a push, that's the way I like to put it. And at the same time, if someone is dancing to it, then the dancer feels that same thing, too. So it's an accent; it's like if you were trying to express something and you just said it in a monotone, it wouldn't have the same emphasis. Well, it's the same thing in the music. It's interesting that you put it in terms of spoken language. Do you think the music reflects the fact that, up until relatively recently, Gaelic was the main language on Cape Breton? Well, I don't understand Gaelic I should, I should be kicked for not learning it but back when I was going to school, the parents at that time figured that learning to speak gaelic was a detriment to your education, that you should put all your emphasis on English, and that type of thing. But nowadayshow wrong they were I just love to listen to [Gaelic speakers], even though I don't understand it, because it's so expressive. Up and down, and that's kind of the way the music is, too, you know[lilts a bar of a strathspey]. You tend to drag out certain notes, so you kind of weave it in and out, yet keep the same timing, and give more value to notes you want to emphasize, and maybe cut back on othersthat sort of thing. Where do you think the ornamentation and gracings in Cape Breton fiddling come from? Have the pipers had an influence in this respect? Well, certainly, the piping has a lot to do with it. If you ever look at pipe music, it's just full of grace notes, and certainly the fiddler will take some from that. But also, our forefathers that came over, even my parents, would sing Gaelic songs, and they'd put grace notes in the Gaelic songs. Presumably, back in Scotland, when they were driven from the Highlands, I would think that the way that they played wouldn't be so terribly different than the way that we play now. We didn't make up a new style in Cape Breton. So, that is possibly it if it's in the pipes, why wouldn't it be in the fiddling, maybe to a lesser extent. But for myself, learning the fiddle, I soon found out that if you didn't put this ornamentation in, the music is pretty flat. And I'd listen to a tape of myself, and I'd say, "Well, how do I get this sound?" So I listened to the older, better fiddlers and watched them and picked things out from each one of them, and I think generally that's the case. Like for instance, the younger players not so much now, but the older players would always use the little finger when they were playing, you know, and the reasons for that are several. I use a lot of vibrato on almost every note that I play, and I use the little finger rather than the open string. The open string gives it a kind of a stark sound. So it just developed, generally speaking, in Cape Breton that they'd tell you, if you didn't use your little finger, you'd never make a good fiddler. I don't know if that's true or not, but... Who were the people that you observed to learn grace notes and other stylistic elements? Well, this would be after I'd played for a few years, like when I was fifteen years old, when I'd be allowed to go to a public square dance; I went to see Scotty Fitzgerald play. I remember we'd be driving over and you could hear the music come tumbling out. I could barely wait to get to the hall. I just loved to hear him, you know. It's hard for me to express how muchit just put a chill down my back. Joe MacLean is another fiddler from home, Angus Chisholm, there are a lot of them. The way that I play, I think I learned a lot of the stuff that I do from watching Scotty and listening to Angus Chisholm tapes and things that he did, and watching other fiddlers, too; if they did something that made me think, "Gosh, that's nice there," I would practice that. But it doesn't just happen naturally; you've got to work at it. It's very foreign at first, but then gradually, once you start to use [these stylistic elements] in the tune, you forget that you're doing it. I know that at many different classes, people would ask me, "What are you doing there?" and I wouldn't have a clue what they were talking about. They'd ask me about the bow, they were saying that I used double up-bowing, and I didn't realize that I did that, you know, double up-bowing or triple up-bowing. And I learned that from watching a great fiddler from down home, Donald Angus Beaton. There used to be a lot of group playing from time to time, especially at the festivals, and you'd see maybe fifty fiddlers playing. Most of them would be bowing the same way, but you noticed Donald Angus Beaton his bow would be up when the others would be down. He took a tremendous effect out of the tunes; he'd be doing double up-bowing and triple up-bowing and come down, so he really expressed the music with the bow a lot more than the average fiddler did. So I would watch him and I'd learn; I'd play some of the tunes he played and I'd try to do what he was doing, and that developed into my style, so I've got a whole mishmash of stuff. That's what I recommend to anybody. If you like what somebody's doing, then try to emulate that. ... I understand that you teach engineering technology at the University College of Cape Breton. Do you see any similarities between your engineering career and your fiddling career? Usually fiddling, or anything you're really enthusiastic about, pervades your whole life to some degree. Well, it's funny you should ask that. On many of my travels at festivals like this I've been out West in California, in Carolina, Boston here, and Ashokan, and many of the ones that are there, interested in playing the fiddle, had something to do with engineering, science or math. They were in that number kind of game, and you see a lot of that. I was playing in Boston here for Ed Pearlman, who has a group of Scottish fiddlers, and a few years ago I was one of his guests, and we were playing at, I think it's Payne Hall, in Harvard. Dougie MacPhee and myself, and we played some numbers. Afterwards, three professors came up, and you know, that's pretty high-class stuff, Harvard professors a Physics professor, a Math professor, a Chemistry professor and all three of them did some fiddling. That's just one example, but also when I was at Ashokan, there was half a dozen people down there who were either engineers or in that area the same out West. You see that a lot. There seems to be a correlation. What goes into choosing which tunes you'll play at a concert or in a given set of tunes? I can go this way or that way. There are thousands of tunes, and it depends if there are other fiddlers and they play these certain tunes a lot. I always try to avoid what other people play; I don't like this repetition kind of thing. A lot of the younger players now, they go into a concert, and they go on and maybe ten of them in a row will play at least one or two or three of the tunes that the other person played. I refuse to play certain tunes, because everybody plays them. Sometimes it's a great tune, but it's just worn to a frazzle, everybody playing and playing and playing it. And there's no need they have so many good tunes, but for some reason or another, they see this person plays it, therefore that must be the one to play. They don't seem to make up their own mind about their own style of tunes. If you went down to Cape Breton I mean up notice we say down: "down North." If you went up to Cape Breton and you went to some of the concerts and dances, you'd very quickly see that there's a certain number of tunes that they all keep playing and playing. That just doesn't interest me. The way I was brought up, fiddlers tended to play for other fiddlers when they'd [play in] a concert. In other words they wanted to kind of impress the other fiddlers, so they'd have a new tune or something special, something different. That seems to be lost now in the new generation; they just do what everybody else is doing. ... [Peter Marten works as a translator and teacher in Helsinki, Finland. His main interests are Celtic, French-Canadian and Finnish fiddling.] [Carl MacKenzie's recordings are available from Fiddlers Crossing (www.fiddlerscrossing.com) and Portland America Distributing, (800) 797-3868.]
New York's Larry Downey: The Fiddler's Fiddlerby Michael Butler"You know how to tell when you're gettin' old?" asks octogenarian Larry Downey, entertaining a concert audience with stage patter between fiddle tunes. "When you bend over to tie your shoes, you look around to see if there's anything else you can do while you're down there." Born August 3, 1910, in Endicott, New York, he still teaches, plays regularly, and performs occasionally. Often, he joins with an ensemble for jam sessions on weekday evenings in a local church, in the region where he's lived his whole life, not far from where the Susquehanna River crosses the Pennsylvania border. Hammer dulcimer, guitar, banjo, mandolin, piano, flute, tin whistle, sometimes an accordion, and always fiddles, get together without an audience, just to play the old repertoire; and Larry Downey is the elder statesman, remembering songs from his childhood, and pretty much the entire century since. He plays with the vigor of a much younger man. "Like a twenty-two-year-old," said an emcee introducing him a while back. He ascribes it to a teacher he had in the 1930s. "'Boy, if you're gonna make a mistake, make a good one,' he said. 'Never mind this short bow stuff! Put that bow on there and draw it!'" Larry laughs at the memory. "If you didn't, he would holler at you. He had a bad temper!" Larry has a different style. "Fiddlin' is fun!" he says. It's the motto inscribed on his cap, fiddle case, return address labels, even a stained-glass sculpture he received as a wedding gift. "When it gets too serious, it ceases to be fun. There's definitely work involved, but it's work you enjoy. It's time-consuming, but it's time well spent, because you're improving your art. The more time you spend in practice, the better you sound and you can do more to please others." Larry accounts for some of his talent from Welsh, Scottish, and Irish forebears. "Welsh people are noted for their abilities with melodies and their singing," he says. His mother's uncle was a violin maker; and he remembers her whistling or humming tunes as she went about her housework, sometimes picking out melodies on a pump organ or piano. He's played concerts, coffeehouses, hotels, weddings, parties, nursing homes, round and square dances. During the 1940s and '50s, he played country-western radio broadcasts with a union orchestra. He's been inducted into the New York State Old-Time Fiddling Association's Hall of Fame. He's entered contests around the eastern U.S., and won a few. "But I really don't like contests. They keep you on your mettle, but the very idea of competition sort of goes against my grain, because it's not really the fun part." In spite of all this experience, "I never became a professional musician," Larry says. He always had a job somewhere else: shoe factory and tannery worker; taxi driver and manager of a cab business; truck driver for the Town of Union; and finally highway foreman for eighteen years before his retirement. ... There's a vaudeville quality in some of his performing, with one-liners and comic bits that keep onlookers grinning. "Don't you ever get tired of playing that same old song the same way every time?" his guitar accompanist, Willard Linklaum, sets him up. The tune is "Turkey In the Straw," and he plays it first in the key of G. "Well, what key should I do it in?" he shoots back. He starts zipping through the tune in different keys, seven or eight times, transposing the notes with spectacular facility and such uproarious effect that folks in the audience are hooting with delight and stamping their feet before he's done. Another tune, "Raggin' the Fiddle," switches wildly between a high-spirited dance and incongruous snatches of nursery rhymes, "Yankee Doodle," and the Three Stooges theme. As he skitters his bow across the strings, sliding his fingers to make wah-wah sounds, I see a concert violinist wince, digging her nails into the arms of her chair. In the next moment, though, he will turn to a soulful ballad, wringing haunting harmonies with double-stops; and then play an original composition that suggests classical influences. In fact, this is a many-sided musician, whose knowledge spans jazz, classical, country-western, popular tunes of the '30s, '40s, and '50s, to the old-time jigs, reels, hornpipes, and waltzes he learned as a child, beginning study at the age of seven. As fiddle teacher to my own son since September 1997, Larry's patience, skill, and generosity have been visible to me fairly up-close observations echoed by everyone who knows him. I've also talked with him more formally about his life and career as a fiddler, including his long-term friendship with the late Jehile B. Kirkhuff, 1954 World Champion Old-Time Fiddler. Here are some excerpts from our conversations. How did you get started? A man came knocking on our door, and he wanted to know if there was anyone in the house who wanted to learn to play the violin. My father said, 'Well, maybe.' He turned to me and said, 'So, what do you say?' I said, 'Yeah, I want to, I'd like to.' So my father said, 'What is the proposition? What are you offering?' He said, 'Well, we charge 75¢ a lesson, and if you take forty-eight lessons, we will give you the violin.' Well, that sounded real great, way back in 1917 or so, and I said, 'Gee, great,' or something to that effect, and so we agreed. The violin that you got... That violin came in a canvas sack. With snaps on it. I don't think it was a full-size violin I don't think I was quite long-armed enough to play a full-size violin, yet. I think they kind of fitted us to the fiddle when we got to take our first lesson. I was walking home from this church I must have been about nine or ten, I think. I'd been playing in that church and it was a bitter, bitter cold night. The moon was shining brightly, and I had that fiddle, in the canvas case, tucked under my arm, and my hands in my pants pockets. And I came to a very slippery, icy spot, and I fell on that poor little fiddle, and crushed it. And that was the end of that one. But we had some neighbors who were throwing away a violin they were just going to throw it in the garbage pail. And someone helped me to get strings, and a bridge, and a tailpiece, and tune it up, and get it going. That's how I got my second fiddle. I don't think from there on I was ever without a violin. What kind of music did you play, when you were first learning? Most of the standard things that were accepted at that time, like "Red Wing," and "Snow Deer," which by the way were on my grandfather's old Edison phonograph, on cylinder records. He had two dresser drawers full of them, and that was a lot of records, because they didn't take a lot of room. I'd go to his house and sit and listen by the hour to the old Edison phonograph. And I remember some of those tunes from before I learned to play the fiddle. Those tunes were in my mind, I could whistle them, or hum 'em, and as soon as I learned how to play, I could play them. You basically learned to play by ear? I was one of the taller boys, so I was in the back of the class, and that made the effect that I only played what I heard, and didn't play what was on the sheet. I had a good ear, having I guess inherited it, and so it was easier for me to play what I heard. I still don't read very well, but I have improved since, due to some help by a very good fiddler whose name was Billy Behr. He was a vaudeville fiddler, and he traveled all over the country, demonstrating trick fiddling, on stage. He was an excellent reader, and he taught me to read, after a fashion. I can get by on most jigs, and reels, and hornpipes. And I love to play at times from the book. Just sit down, and remind myself what I have learned, and forgotten. Sometimes I take the time to look them up, and renew them in my mind. When do you think you were at your best? Maybe now. I don't know. I really don't think I've lost anything. Perhaps a little speed in my vibrato. That varies, according to how you feel. If you're getting feedback from an audience, that you know are enjoying what you're doing, then you can do it much more easily. Your fiddle seems to sing better, if you're getting feedback that people are pleased. It's not a thing that you can put your finger on. But all artists seem to know this. All people who play music have to have this feeling of approbation from their audience. And it instills a desire to excel. How would you describe the style that you play now? "Much varied." I love very, very, varied repertoire. There's certain elements in what I do that's in most jig and reel books, hornpipe style, and like that foot-stompin' music, that's what I like to do things that make you wanna stomp your feet. When I used to play square dances, I used to like to see their knees come right up under their chins! [Michael Butler is a freelance writer and poet who lives in Vestal, New York. He can be contacted at <eggnoir@netscape.net>.]
A Brief History of Fiddle MusicThere is little agreement among ethnomusicologists as to the exact origins of fiddle music, but nearly all agree that it didn't start in Palo Alto, California. (Fiddler Magazine Music Editor Jack Tuttle still advocates this theory to anyone who will listen, but his views are generally dismissed by serious scholars, who believe Tuttle to be dangerously unbalanced.) The fact is that the earliest form of fiddle music, which is to say, folk tunes played on bowed instruments, was developed by ancient Roman archers who discovered that their bow strings made a pleasing, musical sound when plucked. Later, it was discovered that by drawing an adjacent bow across the string, the archer could produce an even, sustained musical note. More strings were added to produce different pitches, and soon, armies all over Europe were forming impromptu "string bands." Unfortunately, these earliest "fiddlers" were slaughtered by the invading Huns, a humorless bunch who had no use for fiddle music. The fiddle, and fiddle music, saw no real advancement for several hundred years until a 16th century inventor in Cremona, Italy, was experimenting with different uses for cat guts. He discovered, quite by accident, that when stretched across a violin-shaped wooden box and bowed with horse-hair, the cat-gut strings produced a sound that was uniquely annoying. He immediately saw in his creation the potential for what was to become the first air-raid siren. Unfortunately, initial demand for the device was sluggish, as military attack by air was still centuries away. However, the inventor happened to retain the services of a young apprentice who was searching for a new instrument to compliment the new "three-finger style" of lute playing that was all the rage during the "folk-boom" of the early Renaissance. The apprentice was none other than Antonius Stradavarius. Stradavari began marketing the new instrument, which he dubbed the "violin" (from the Latin for "vile sounding"). Many Stradavarius are still in circulation today, though they are not the preferred instrument of serious fiddlers. Many improvements in design and tone have been achieved through modern manufacturing techniques, and today's discriminating fiddler chooses one of the many high-end fiddles that are mass-produced in state-of-the-art factories in China. The fiddle continued to flourish in the 17th and 18th centuries. For example, it is widely know that Thomas Jefferson was an accomplished fiddler. What is less known, however, is the fact thatone of Jefferson's early drafts of the Declaration of Independence listed Life, Liberty and Kick-Ass Fiddlin' as the three inalienable rights of Man. Jefferson's colleagues argued that the inclusion of fiddle music might not have universal appeal, and could jeopardize unity among the colonies. Jefferson reluctantly agreed, and thereby got his first lesson in the politics of compromise. The 19th century is sometimes referred to as the "Golden Age of the Fiddle," a clear reference to the fact that most fiddles from this era were made entirely of gold. Today, fiddle music is more popular than ever, preceded only by Rock, Pop, Jazz, Classical, Country, Salsa, Marching Band and Polka music in terms of its universal popularity. [Paul Squyres is a guitarist and fiddler living in Scotts Valley, California. He performs in The Tall Timber Boys, along with his friend and Fiddler Magazine Music Editor, Jack Tuttle.] For full versions of these articles, please visit Fiddler Magazine store to order back issues. |
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