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Summer 1997Articles
Tunes
ARTICLE EXCERPTS
The Romance of the Kentucky FiddlerBy Bruce GreeneTo love Kentucky fiddling is to have a romance with the past. It is music that is intimately tied to the land and a rural way of life that has now mostly disappeared, but lives on in the colorfully named tunes and equally colorful characters who have passed them down to us. For most people in the 1990s, however, the days when rural fiddling was still passed down through the generations as a living tradition seem very remote and long ago. The few fiddlers who survived into the late twentieth century and grew up in that tradition are looked upon with reverence, for they are survivors of a simple, unhurried world that has long ago been left behind by our fast-paced technological society, and they have left us with our only clues into the mystery of where this music came from and what shaped it into its present form. There is much to be learned from their lives, because with their presence gone from the world, old time fiddling as a traditional art has passed some invisible point of no return. Now we can learn from recordings, books, at camps, and at festivals. We can learn to play old time, Cajun, Irish, contest style. It is still traditional music, but it is no longer rooted in traditional culture. Fiddle music will never again be learned the way the old timers learned it –– by absorbing it in the course of everyday life. There is currently a great revival of interest in traditional Kentucky fiddling, and for good reason. Nowhere has a greater body of fine tunes, lore, and legend been retained and preserved for our inspiration. This interest was first fueled by Library of Congress recordings made in the 1930s by Alan Lomax of Luther Strong, William Stepp, and other eastern Kentucky fiddlers. Their extraordinarily skilled, archaic playing led others to speculate on the potential musical treasures in that area. Folklorists and collectors began to comb the hills for still living fiddlers, and field recordings by D. K. Wilgus, Lynwood Montell, John Cohen, Peter Hoover, and others proved that they were still there. In the 1970s, independent collectors, led by Guthrie Meade, Bruce Greene, and John Harrod began systematically documenting the fiddle traditions of large parts of the state. A three volume set of commercial reissues called Old Time Fiddle Band Music from Kentucky, and a collection of home recordings of legendary fiddler Ed Haley were released. Recently, the Berea College series of recordings of Kentucky fiddlers, and two volumes of field recordings called Traditional Fiddle Music of Kentucky were also released, adding immensely to the wider awareness of the great depth and variety of fiddle music from the state, as well as to the myths and romance that have always been part of the public perception of Kentucky. The images have been present for a long time. In colonial times, the Kentucky country was looked on as the remote and mysterious frontier, the Cumberland Gap as the gateway to independence and unbelievably fertile land. In literature, the legendary hunters and explorers and adventurers more often than not claimed Kentucky as their land of origin, as if that somehow gave more credibility to their larger than life achievements. In the first part of the 1900s, when ballad collecting was in great vogue, Kentucky was looked upon in its isolation as the last stronghold of our Elizabethan forebears from the old world, and therefore the most fertile ground for finding the ancient ballads still intact. Local color stories and magazine articles depicted Kentucky in the same way –– a land where the past nostalgically lived on, unaffected by the rest of the world. Even in the 1970s, people would tell me, "Oh, yes, I’ve always heard that all the best fiddlers came out of Kentucky." Kentucky has been pervaded by a deeply romanticized sense of reverence for the past. Kentucky author Harriette Simpson Arnow once wrote, "My people loved the past more than their present lives, I think, but it cannot be said we lived in the past." And nowhere is this statement more true than when applied to the Kentucky fiddler. I have had the privilege of knowing a number of fiddlers from around the state who were born before or shortly after the turn of the last century, and they surely had one foot in the past and one in the present. They remembered in great detail growing up in the days before automobiles, televisions, telephones –– electricity at all, for that matter –– yet they seemed quite at ease living in the modern world. Still, the past was never far away. They seemed to have endless tales and reminiscences concerning the music and where it came from and who were the great players of olden times. Their reverence for the antiquity of the music and the fiddlers from past generations was always fresh in their minds. I remember many conversations about some old timer who had been dead for thirty years or more that ended with, "You remember him, don’t you?" As if I had been back there with him, or it had just happened last week. Much of Kentucky in the 1970s and ’80s was just such a mix of the past and the present, and by that time most of the traditional music had slipped quietly into the background of people’s lives. As an Allen County fiddler, James Hood said, "A lot of them has quit. I know a lot of fiddlers I thought was better than anything you hear now. But they said that so many of ’em got to playing different kinds of music, playing different styles, that they just quit. I’ve had lots of ’em to tell me that." And so, many times I strayed off the main roads as I roamed the state, to stumble onto a piece of the past that should no longer be there, yet somehow was. That was how in 1991, I met the eccentric ballad singer Pleaz Mobley, who had some brief notoriety in the 1960s performing at festivals with fiddler Clester Hounchel, before disappearing into obscurity. I had assumed him dead long ago. And that was how I met fiddler Sid Hudnall, who lived with his ancient mother in an isolated farmstead, called Happy Valley because there they had escaped the curse of civilization all their lives. And that was how in 1971 I met the sister of legendary fiddler Henry Bandy. Bandy was born in 1876 and died in 1952, but she insisted that if I wanted to know so much about him, I should just go ask him in person. There is a great deal more to traditional Kentucky fiddling than just the tunes themselves. They are romantic expressions of a world and a kind of people we will never know again. So let them tell you their stories about what it was like to know old time fiddling in a time gone by, and why the old Kentucky fiddle music was inseparable from the players’ lives and the lives of those who came before them. We’ll begin where I began. Luther Strong When I was first becoming aware of old time fiddle music, I heard some recordings of William "Billie" Stepp and Luther Strong, two of the finest eastern Kentucky fiddlers ever to be recorded. Their haunting and exciting renditions of classic pieces like "Ways of the World," "The Hog Eyed Man," and "The Last of Callahan" captivated me and surely were the beginning of my own romance with Kentucky fiddling. So of course I tried to find out more about them. One evening I was visiting with Donald Goodman in Booneville, and he began to reminisce about Luther Strong. Donald had gone to school with Strong’s son and knew that family quite well. It seems that there had been a legendary Owsley County fiddler named Moab "Dude" Freeman, who was something of a vagabond. He wandered around eastern Kentucky like a hobo, even traveled out west and back, and was considered one of the finest fiddlers to ever live in that region. Donald said Strong played more like Freeman than anyone he ever heard, and he was sure that was where Strong learned to play. He said Strong had an extra long bow "and used every bit of it." Rumor had it that he put pennies under the feet of his bridge to get a keener sound, but Donald said he was there when Strong began that practice. He said they were at some local fiddlers’ contest, and Strong said he couldn’t compete because the bridge was too low on his fiddle and the strings rubbed on the fingerboard. So Donald suggested placing pennies under the bridge to raise it up. It worked well, Strong went on to play "Sally Goodin’" and win the contest, and he liked the pennies so much, that he just kept them there, saying, "It’s just like Baby Bear, it’s just right." But who knows? They say he was bad to drink from time to time, and a tale went around that when the Library of Congress came around in 1937 to record him, he had no fiddle at all, and they had to haul him out of jail and have him play on a borrowed fiddle. Luther Strong died in 1963. Twelve years later, I asked an elderly Knott County fiddler who had known Strong if he could play the "Hog Eyed Man." He said, "I can play it, but if you want to hear it played right, you should go hear Luther Strong play it." I said, "But I thought Luther Strong was dead." "No, he lives down here on the river in Hazard," he assured me. "Well, how long has it been since you’ve seen him?" He thought a moment and said, "It’s been about twenty years, I guess." Charlie Kessinger There was a fiddler I only spent one evening with in 1974, but who left me with an unforgettable memory of a man from another age, living as a stranger in modern times. Early in the spring of 1974, I would sit out on the porch of our house in Bowling Green, Kentucky, playing fiddle and guitar with my brother. Every couple of days, an elderly man would walk by and stop to listen a while. Finally, he introduced himself as Leonard Kessinger, and we stopped to visit with him. It turned out his father was a fiddler and he played guitar with him when he was a young man. So I arranged to go visit them at their homeplace in nearby Morgantown. Charlie Kessinger was born in 1883, in Butler County. He learned to play fiddle and banjo from his father, who was born in 1857, when that part of Kentucky was still barely settled. Charlie talked with great emotion about learning to play as a boy, and about the fiddlers he grew up around, all of whom he had long outlived: "I learned first one tune, then another. And I used to be awful bad to whistle. All I had to do was hear them play. I’d get the tune and go to whistling it, and I learned it from my whistling. I was a wonderful whistler, but now I’ve got these old false teeth, I can’t whistle at all with ’em. "I played a tune for a long time before I knowed any name for it. My daddy caught it from an old cross-eyed man whistling it. And we always called it ‘Jud Dougherty’s Tune.’ That was the old man’s name. One of my neighbors wanted us to bring my violin one night and play somewhere. I began to play that, and he began singing right after me, ‘Down in New Orleans.’ That was the name of it. "I learnt ‘McKinley March’ and ‘Whistling Rufus’ from Jim Wallace James. Taken all around, he was the best musician I ever seen. He couldn’t use a bow, though, like my daddy could. My daddy could handle a bow the best of any fiddler I ever played with. "‘Old Tennessee’ –– Lord, I wish I had a good fiddler to play after that tune. I did love to pick that on a banjer…. That’s been a long time ago. Been a lot of change in things since then. I used to have some of the finest fiddlers to play with when I was a young man. Five or six different ones, and they’re every one dead." At this point, he broke down and began to cry. Jim Bowles Jim Bowles was born in 1903 in Monroe County, Kentucky. He grew up in a very musical area, and he was influenced by a number of local fiddlers. His mother told him of the musicians from the past, such as Gilbert Maxey: "He was an old colored man, and they had him playing for those old dances. ‘What’s that, Uncle Gilbert?’ ‘Christmas Eve," he’d say. ‘Well, by God, can’t you play nothing but ‘Christmas Eve’?’ So he’d start on the same tune. And she said he’d play the same tune every time. It was the only one he knew. ‘Christmas Eve’ was the best dancing tune in the world, and he could play it, she said. That’s been ninety years ago. "I guess I was about ten years old. I’d always play –– you have those little sticks of stovewood, you know, and I’d get ’em up and saw on ’em, like I was a-fiddling –– when I was a little bitty feller. And my father, times was hard and he had to go to Indiana and make money. Back in them days, there wasn’t no money to be got hardly. And he came through Louisville, and he came to a pawn shop. He bought me a fiddle. And of course I learnt several tunes." One of the first fiddlers Jim learned from was a traveling photographer named Homer Botts: "He used to come here. He made pictures. Just run around over the country. I don’t guess he ever worked any. And he’d come here, and Mother’d say, ‘Well, Homer, you been to dinner? We’ll give you your dinner and you can take some of our pictures.’ And he had a camera. It’s set up on things like tobacco sticks. And he’d play them tunes, now. And he’d stay here sometimes all night with us. He was an awful good fiddler –– real smooth." Jim’s main teacher, however, was his uncle Wash Carter: "He had a good education, Uncle Wash did. He taught school, was a lawyer. And he learnt me a lot about fiddling. I’ve heard my mother say she used to hear him fiddle when she was a young girl. See, we was raised right here by him, and he’d come up here. When I was a young boy, why, he got crippled –– he took the rheumatiz, something –– and I’d play ‘Cumberland Gap,’ and I didn’t come down on the fine part like he wanted to, and he’d just quarrel at me, and he says, ‘I know you can do that.’ "I got to going to contests. I guess I was twenty years old. They used to have them at Tompkinsville. They’d have ’em at schoolhouses, at high schools, and places like that. I’ve played in contests with an old fiddler Cooney Perdue, but boy I couldn’t do nothing with him. Henry Ford took him way up there, you know, years ago, and played in a contest. He like to have won it." Jim played semi-professionally in his younger years. In the early days of radio, he played fiddle for Finley "Red" Belcher, who went on to become a well known performer around Kentucky before his death in an automobile accident. Around 1972, when Jim was in his late sixties, a neighbor of his told me that he was not looking too good, and didn’t look like he was going to be around much longer. Jim Bowles lived to be ninety years old, and finally passed away in 1993. Gusty Wallace Gustace "Gusty" Wallace was born in Hart County, Kentucky, on November 24, 1890. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to neighboring Sulphur Well, where he lived for the rest of his life. His father was one of the most renowned old time fiddlers in that part of Kentucky, and Gusty was inspired by him to learn to play. "My dad, his name was Addison. They called him Ad, you know. Ad’s father went to kind of a musical one time. They was playing all these pieces… He says, ‘I wish Ad was here.’ –– That was my daddy, you know –– And they said, ‘Why, Mr. Wallace, there’s a lot of people here can play these pieces.’ He said, ‘I know it, but there ain’t none of ’em can give it that little whiff of the bow that Ad’s got.’ "I started playing at seven. My dad would go to work and left the fiddle on the bed. I played it while he was at work. I played two or three little pieces before he knew it… ‘Shortening Bread,’ ‘Bound To Have a Little Fun’…" Gusty began to play for dances by the time he was twelve or thirteen and continued to do so all his life. In the 1930s, he fiddled professionally with the Bob Atcher band in Louisville, and later on with the Prairie Ramblers in Des Moines, Iowa, hobnobbing with Clayton McMichen and Sleepy Marlin along the way. As a result, his repertoire and playing style ranged from the old local tunes to more modern rags and popular songs. However, Gusty spent most of his life in Sulphur Well, where aspiring fiddlers for miles around came to him for inspiration. I was told that Charlie Bush brought his young son Sam to learn from Gusty. Gusty had a little shack out behind his house –– his "music room" –– where he could go and play for hours without disturbing his wife, Ella. We had many a long session there, interrupted only by the hour when the Lawrence Welk show came on. We would go in and sit with Ella, and Gusty would say, "Now that’s real music." I learned a lot about fiddling from Gusty, and being only twenty years old, I also learned a lot about life. We were getting together regularly to play and record for some time, working out intricate arrangements of fiddle tunes with the banjo, but then I got into a busy time at school and didn’t see him for several weeks. One day I received a letter from him which said, "We were doing so good together, and now you’ve quit me." Suddenly I realized that this old man was not just a fiddler, but a friend who counted on my company. Gusty must have decided it was time for me to grow up, because not long after that we had another little run-in. The Wallaces were Mormons, members of a Mormon Church settlement that had been in the area for a long time and endured no little friction with the other competing Christian denominations locally. Toward the end of one visit, Gusty went in the back room and came out with a Mormon Bible. He proceeded to begin my religious education for me, according to his point of view. I found the first excuse I could to tell him it was time for me to be heading home now, but he followed me to the car and continued his testimonial while I sat there with the engine running, too embarrassed to just cut him off and leave. Finally, enjoying himself immensely, he stopped and said, "Bruce, do you think all I ever do is just sit around here and play the fiddle?" Gusty died in 1985 at the age of ninety-five, when his house burned down. He was trapped upstairs. One of the last of the old generation of south-central Kentucky fiddlers, he was a living example of the importance that the old timers placed on being faithful to one’s cultural as well as family traditions: "My father died when I was seventeen years old, and I never will forget what he said. He called me to the bed, and he said, ‘Well, it’s left up to you to do the playing now.’" Pat Kingery Pat Kingery was born in 1912. He lived most of his life in the little community of Nobob, in Barren County, Kentucky. As a boy he learned tunes from his mother’s whistling, and from his uncle Jodie Matthews who came to visit occasionally from Wayne County farther east. As Pat grew older, he was influenced by many excellent local fiddlers, including the well-known Carver family, and Page Ellis, who represented Barren County in the regional contest sponsored by Henry Ford in the 1920s. Pat eventually played semi-professionally and was to be influenced by Tommy Jackson and other fiddlers around Nashville in the ’40s and ’50s. He played for years around the southern part of Kentucky in a band called "Pat Kingery and His Kentuckians." As a result, Pat had a large and varied repertoire, ranging from the rare local tunes to more modern radio music. He was one of the many fiddlers of his generation caught between the romance of the old traditions and the allure of professionalism. But he remembered vividly what it was that kept him attached to his roots: "I had a hard way to go to get started. My daddy died when I was real little. There was nobody left but me and my mother and my brother. Back then, you made a quarter any way you could, and you could sell possum hides and stuff like that, you know. My dad used to trap, and we had some traps back here, so I set them traps out, caught some possums and stuff, two or three skunks one time. There was an old feller lived down across the way, bought furs. So one day I went to see the old man and take my furs to sell a few. I walked up on the front porch, and I heard something and I stopped. And I had never heard anything that sounded as pretty. Well, I forgot about being cold. I forgot about everything. I just stood there. By and by, he quit, and I knocked on the door, and he said, ‘Come in.’ And I went in. And he was sitting over in a chair in front of the fireplace, and he had this thing in his hands. And I never said, ‘I got some furs,’ nor nothing. Said, ‘What is that you got?’ He said, ‘That’s a fiddle.’ And I said, ‘Is that what I heard a while ago?’ He said, ‘Yep. Did you like it?’ I said, ‘I sure did.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll play you another one, then. Then we’ll look at your hides.’ So he set there and played ‘When You and I were Young, Maggie.’ That was the first time I ever seen a fiddle or ever heard one. But it done something to me that I never could get rid of. It created a desire that some way, some how, I knew I had to play a fiddle. "I was about nine years old then. So you know how they used to send out in the mail these Sears and Roebuck catalogs. My mother had one of them. And she had it spread on her lap. And turning the pages of that catalog, I seen a picture of a fiddle. And it drove me crazy. I wanted one, said I’m gonna get me one. Well, it must have been about this time of year (January), this magazine came out. It had an advertisement in it that said, ‘Sell thirty packages of garden seed to get this violin.’ I begged my mother to let me do that. And she finally agreed to it, sent off and got the seed. And of course the neighbors felt sorry for me. They bought ’em right off. And I sent it in, and I waited and waited and waited ’til it come. And it finally got here, the whole thing wasn’t but about that long [twelve inches]. Just a little bitty toy. And that’s what I started to learn to play the fiddle on. "When I was about eleven years old, they let me have a few rows of tobacco across the tobacco patch. And I sold that tobacco. It brought twenty-eight dollars. And I got the Sears and Roebuck catalog and bought my first fiddle." Pat’s health was very poor. When I
went to his house, he would drag himself up out of the bed and stand in
the middle of the room, swaying back and forth, and play until he gave out.
He knew I was interested in the older tunes and would think about them between
times that I saw him, and try to play them for me when we got together.
I guess he understood that this was his last opportunity to pass his music
on. The last time I saw him was in 1976. His brother Edgar told me he had
been put into the hospital in nearby Glasgow, so I went to see him there.
I was leaving for the summer to work up north, and I pretty well knew I’d
never see him again. As we parted, I told him, "I’ll play one
for you." He said, "I’d like that."
Bruce Greene: Carrying On Kentucky’s Old Time TraditionsBy Mary LarsenWhen Bruce Greene left his native New Jersey to study folklore at Western Kentucky University, he probably never dreamed the music he loved would become such a big part of his life. As a college student and afterwards, Bruce befriended and learned from many Kentucky fiddlers born in the last century who still played the old style. Bruce has been carrying on these archaic tunes and this lovely old style of playing ever since. Bruce’s latest recording, the critically-acclaimed Five Miles of Ellum Wood: Old Time Kentucky Fiddle Solos, pays tribute to those old-timers he learned from and whom he deeply respects. Although Bruce is sad to see the traditions of the world disappearing day by day, he is certainly doing his part to carry on his own preferred style of traditional music. In addition to recording, Bruce occasionally teaches at such summer music schools as Augusta, Mars Hill, Swannanoa, and the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes. You’re originally from New Jersey…how did you get an interest in Kentucky? Did you choose to go to college there because you were interested in the music? Well, I was interested in the music at that point in my life. I was thinking about being a folklorist. At that time there were very few schools –– I wanted to go somewhere in the south, because I liked the music — and there were very few schools where you could take folklore classes on an undergraduate level. Most of them, if they had anything, were Master’s programs, and I wanted to study it right then. So Western Kentucky University was one where you could study it as an undergraduate. So I just kind of took that name out of a hat, really, and went down there without knowing what I was getting into. It turned out to be a really good experience, because they had two or three teachers who were really into the music. This one teacher had grown up around some old musicians –– he was from Kentucky –– so he gave me a couple of people to look up and start out with that he knew already. Were the fiddlers you looked up open and eager to share their music and stories with you? Well, it varied quite a bit. There were some that were still playing actively more or less, and they were glad of anybody to get together with. But then there were a lot of people, the real old guys, that quit years ago, had just kind of forgotten about it, and I had to push them a lot to get them to play. Like the first time I’d go there they wouldn’t play, wouldn’t play, wouldn’t play, and I’d come back again a month later, they’d feel like playing that time. I think part of it was just not being sure about a stranger. So they’d wait and see if you were going to come back and weren’t just somebody passing through. It varied all the time. How did you get the interest in folklore as a teenager? It wasn’t exactly just folklore, but I just kind of got interested in folk music, the whole folk revival thing. I don’t know exactly why. It seemed like whenever I’d hear records of older traditional songs, I was always kind of attracted to that for some reason. What instruments did you play? I started to play the guitar when I was about twelve, and the banjo when I was about fifteen, and I got a fiddle when I was eighteen or nineteen. I remember what really got me interested in the fiddle, and it just happened that it also got me interested in Kentucky fiddling, was one of those Library of Congress recordings that were around at that time. The library in the town where I was living had a record collection, and they had those Library of Congress recordings. And one of them had those two Kentucky fiddlers, Luther Strong and Bill Stepp. So they were some of the first ones I ever heard, and I remember it seemed so strange, just neat music, so different from any violin stuff I’d heard. When I was a kid we used to go to square dances at a grange hall in town, but it was nothing like that kind of dance music…. How did you learn to play, strictly by ear? Did you take lessons from anybody? I never took lessons from anybody. When I first decided I wanted to learn to play, I bought a violin from some local place, and just had to try to play along with records, and kind of stumbled around for a long time. When I look back, it was strange because I was sort of aware that there was a big old-time music community around New York City, but I guess I was just too young and shy or something. I didn’t ever go there and try to find people that I could learn from. I started out learning from records. I didn’t know anything about how to use a bow, I just tried to make the notes. So it went kind of slowly to start. Was it the same with guitar and banjo? Did anybody help you with those? Banjo was like that. With guitar, when I first started out, I took a few guitar lessons from a music teacher –– just kind of generic guitar lessons. And I didn’t like that much; I just quit. But I had a cousin who was into all this folk singing stuff, and she’d come to visit, and played and sang folk songs. That’s really kind of what got me started playing music. I just kind of went from there. What are some of the differences between western and eastern Kentucky styles? …The more I think about it over the years, the less I can distinguish styles, because the people I learned from, and the music I’ve heard from all around Kentucky, it’s so dependent on the individual. There was one man I learned a lot from out in western Kentucky, who really played more like what people think of as an eastern Kentucky style. It’s hard for me to generalize a style… Eastern Kentucky is known for having that dark, modal sounding stuff, a lot of solo playing, a lot of cross-tuning, things like that. And western Kentucky, at least when I was around there, didn’t have too much of that… It was close enough to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry and all that, I think it was influenced a lot by radio. One thing I would say is that there wasn’t the kind of isolation in western Kentucky that there was in eastern Kentucky, so I think they had more influences passing through. Whereas in eastern Kentucky, there were a lot of people that really just were there and were never really affected by much outside their own region. Did these people you learned from play mostly by themselves or with other people, or for dances? Well, when they were young they played with people a lot. When I was learning to play, when I was living around there, as a tradition, it was really on the decline. The people that got together and played really did more kind of newer music –– bluegrass, and stuff they got on the radio. There were very few people that got together and just played the old tunes. As far as a living tradition, I think it had pretty much evolved into bluegrass and more modern music. So with a lot of the fiddlers I’d get together with, they always said they hardly played at all except when I’d come around, and then we’d play the old tunes. Kentucky’s funny, because it had an incredibly strong music tradition, and it kind of has this mystique, and yet it never really got discovered much. A lot of bluegrass and country musicians came out of Kentucky, but as far as their old traditional music, so little of it really got any attention paid to it until it was almost gone. If you compare it to places like Missouri, and Texas maybe, places where there’s a real active fiddling community, Kentucky, when I was living there –– that was mostly the ’70s –– there was nothing like that, really. There were just little isolated pockets of people that got together. There were lots of fiddlers, but they were all scattered around, and most of them wanted to play newer music. So you really had to beat the bushes to find the old people who knew the old-fashioned stuff, which was what I was after. What do you think people can do to preserve these real traditional ways of playing, to learn all the nuances… Well, I guess the biggest thing I can think of is to listen to as much as you can of it. It’s a little bit ticklish of a thing to say, I suppose, but a lot of the subtleties of the old style of playing [are lost] in a string band context; you don’t hear that stuff. I think the more people play in string bands, the less inclined they are to put in a lot of the subtle stuff, and carry on a lot of the kind of strange modal tunes and things like that. So I tend to think of it as music that you play by yourself, or with one or two people at a time. It’s definitely not festival style music. One thing I’ve thought a lot about, if you talk about Kentucky style, is I think, especially with eastern Kentucky, a lot of the style is not so much to do with that region as it is to do with being an older style. Recordings I’ve heard of real old fiddlers from other parts of the country seem to me very much like the eastern Kentucky style fiddlers, and that made me think that it’s more something to do with how far back in time the style goes, more than what regions they’re from. So what you think of as a classic eastern Kentucky style, to me is just really more of an older style that was probably a lot more widespread in the old days, and it just kind of hung on in eastern Kentucky longer. People like Marcus Martin and Bill Hensley, the old fiddlers down here in North Carolina, they could just as well have been from Kentucky, the way I knew Kentucky music. Some of the Mississippi fiddlers that people listen to, it’s the same way. It’s pretty vague stuff, because we have so few examples of the older players, from back in the 1800s. There are really just isolated little examples of playing from that time. So it’s awful risky to make too many generalizations…. How do you encourage students to learn? Are there any specific techniques you teach? Well, I concentrate a lot on bowing. I know a lot of unusual tunes and kind of rare tunes that people are interested in. But I do try to give them some basic bowing techniques, of what I know as kind of the older style traditional playing. I put a lot of emphasis on that, because all the older fiddlers always say that all your playing is in the bow for the old southern style stuff. And it really is pretty true for most of the tunes. A lot of it’s not near as notey as northern music, or contest style stuff, things like that. Although some of it is. But generally speaking, it’s more kind of hoedown stuff, and there is a lot of bow work involved. So that’s really what I like to emphasize… A lot of a tune is defined by the certain bowing patterns that you have, and that affects the notes you make. One of the old fiddlers described it to me that you would start out with a long down pull of the bow and fill in with a lot of sawing and different kinds of patterns, shuffling kind of things, and generally you try to end up the phrase with an up stroke of the bow. Wherever you go, people have different names to describe things like that, but John Salyer’s family always said that he would describe it as rolling the bow. Like to end a phrase on an up-stroke of the bow, you would come down and roll the bow back over to end up going up, and it could be done in bunch of different ways, with different kinds of shuffling patterns, but it always ended up with the bow rolling back up in an upward direction. They were trying to learn from him, and he’d always get after them and say "roll your bow there." Sometimes they could get it and sometimes they couldn’t…. You hold your fiddle against your chest or shoulder. Did you learn that way originally or did you pick it up when you went to Kentucky? I guess I did pick it up after I went to Kentucky. And I kind of experimented back and forth with it under my chin and against my chest for quite a while, and I’m not sure why I ended up with the against the chest thing. A lot of those old people hold it that way, but not all of them. I guess I thought it looked old-timey or something, you know? [Laughter] Then I got stuck that way. You kind of rock the fiddle when you play… Yeah, well, I never did that consciously. When you’re holding it against your chest, it’s a lot more liable to move around that way, and it just kind of happens. One time somebody pointed that out to me, and it was the first time I ever really knew I was doing it. And they say this old fiddler Ed Haley, who was around Kentucky and West Virginia, they talk about him doing it. And I’ll bet anything that it was the same thing, that it just naturally happened, holding the fiddle that way. I’m starting to think about changing it, actually, because I’ve developed tendonitis in my left elbow, and I think it’s probably partly to do with holding the fiddle that way. So when I get to where I can play more, I think I might experiment with holding it other ways and see what happens. I’ll probably ruin my image, but I’ve got to do it. I haven’t even touched the fiddle for about three months. I overdid it last summer and got this tendonitis. It’s starting to get better now, but it’s been a long stretch of time not playing. Do you read music? Just barely. Not enough to really say I do. Would you like to read better, or do you consider it more of a hindrance? I don’t think it’s a hindrance, but I don’t know how much I’d really get out of it. I don’t know why, exactly, but most of the tunes I know, I learned from people. I’ve learned a few out of books –– I meticulously pick out the melody one note at a time off paper. It seems like for some reason, the things I learn from books, or even from records, I don’t retain as well. Having learned so much from these old-timers, it just seems like I have to have some kind of personal connection to the tune to really keep it in my head. So the stuff I learn off paper, I have to really work at keeping it memorized. It’s kind of peculiar…. Do you have any advice for people learning? You know, it’s funny, I look at myself as kind of in a backwater or something with fiddling, because I’ve concentrated so much on just a certain region’s music. I kind of feel like I’m a little out of the mainstream. But something I always did think a lot about was… to me, what I love about fiddling are the traditions that have been handed down to us. Everywhere you go there was a different tradition and a different style of playing, and that’s what I love about music and fiddling, and I think that’s partly why I’ve tried so much just to play one regional type of playing. Because I hate to see all the different regional styles get homogenized and disappear. I guess if I were going to give some advice, that’s what I would encourage them to do: try to learn the music of a region, or a style, and learn it really well, and not try to do too many different things. I guess that attitude fits into a lot of my philosophy about life in the first place. As time changes, especially as the older traditional fiddlers are all dying out, fiddling is really changing. People don’t have their example to hold onto very much. Fiddling’s becoming a lot more, I’d say eclectic, I guess. People just play whatever appeals to them, without worrying about where it came from or anything like that. In a way, I think that’s really a shame, but at the same time, when I think about the old people I knew, most of them didn’t have any prejudices about it like that. They learned anything they came across that they happened to like. They wouldn’t say, "That doesn’t sound like an old Kentucky piece, I’m not going to learn that." Anything that grabbed their attention, they’d try to learn it, because they just loved music. They weren’t aware of preserving a regional style. It’s hard to say. Traditional fiddling has kind of moved on into a realm of preserving something, rather than just playing what you grew up around. What if there is no local traditional style where some people live? Do you think people should buy recordings of a particular region and try to learn from them? I don’t know. But it is just so sad to me to see the regional traditions die out. You see, really, anymore, there are hardly any regional styles at all. Not even around here. Other than people self-consciously carrying on some regional style. I guess what I’m saying is that that’s what I wish would be happening, but I realize that that’s not the way the world is anymore. I don’t know how I’d advise people about that. As years go on, I think more and more that all that really matters is to enjoy yourself with music. Have fun with it, whatever you’re doing. Tradition is a funny thing. Tradition is less and less a factor in the world anymore. I learned so much within the tradition that I still think of it that way a lot, but I know it’s not really available to people much anymore. [To contact Bruce Greene about workshops or bookings, write him at Route 5, Box 340, Burnsville, NC 28714.]
Stuart Duncan: Nashville’s Versatile VirtuosoBy Jack TuttleWhen I first heard Stuart Duncan play at a bluegrass festival in the summer of 1978, there was little doubt that the future of bluegrass fiddling was in good hands. All of fourteen years old, he was sitting in with Mac Wiseman at a bluegrass festival in Indiana, improvising through songs with a maturity that belied his age. That was nearly twenty years ago. Now, at the age of thirty-three, he is a seasoned veteran. As fiddler for the Nashville Bluegrass Band, Stuart Duncan has won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s "Fiddler of the Year" award for seven years running. In addition, his demand in the Nashville studio scene has made him one of the most recorded players in the bluegrass, country and contemporary acoustic music fields. Rising to the top of his profession is no accident. Stuart’s playing reflects a mature approach that balances taste with virtuosity. Though he’s comfortable in numerous idioms, it is in the bluegrass world that he has had the biggest impact. His playing reflects an exploring, creative imagination, yet it’s always grounded by a deep understanding of the early bluegrass stylists, like Chubby Wise and Benny Martin. His driving, aggressive attack, complex phrasing and flawless execution, even on the most demanding passages, have made him the prototype bluegrass fiddler for the nineties. Stuart was inspired to take up the fiddle at age seven, after hearing performances by Vassar Clements, Byron Berline, Bill Cunningham, Dan Hicks, Side Page and others at a folk club in Escondido, California, where his father worked as a sound man. Stuart took classical lessons for a few months, but promptly switched to lessons from an old-time fiddler. "He showed me ‘Soldier’s Joy’ and I was on my way," says Stuart. At age nine, Stuart formed his first band. They soon won a San Diego radio station contest, with a first prize of a trip to Nashville with a Friday night appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. Also on the show that night were Lester Flatt, Jimmy Martin, Bill Anderson, and Billy Walker. Stuart discontinued his lessons at that point, choosing instead to listen to and play along with records. "My dad was driving to L.A. at least once a week to pick up a new record for me." Some of Stuart’s biggest influences around this time were Byron Berline, Vassar Clements, StÚphane Grappelli, Joe Venuti, Chubby Wise, Kenny Baker, Darrol Anger, and Sam Bush. Stuart dabbled briefly in the contest scene, but found that bluegrass didn’t go over too well in the contests. "There was a little bit of politics involved in some of those tight-woven California old-time fiddle camps, and my tendencies to play a lot of bluegrass were not real welcome at that time. They were pretty strict about that kind of thing." At age seventeen, Stuart went to South Plains College in Levelland, Texas, with the aim of getting an Associate’s Degree in Bluegrass. He stayed there just one year, however. "I felt like it was something that I could have put to much greater use if I had set my mind to it. It was an age problem. Maybe I should have finished that last year of high school and waited till I was eighteen or nineteen." Stuart then spent three years with Lost Highway, and played in a country bar in San Bernardino: "Electric guitar, electric fiddle, singing Merle Haggard songs. Little did I know I’d be playing country music five days a week ten years later." Stuart then worked with Larry Sparks for a year before joining the Nashville Bluegrass Band. The following interview took place in Palo Alto, California, in September, 1996. When did you realize you were going to be a full-time professional musician? I don’t know. Maybe that last time I saw Byron play before I started taking lessons! Maybe I haven’t decided yet [laughter]. When you were a youngster, how important were your parents in creating the environment for all this to happen? It wouldn’t have happened without them. I bring this up because I think I first saw you at the age of thirteen in Indiana. Talking to your dad, he told me you were spending the summer travelling to bluegrass festivals, which I thought was a pretty neat thing for a parent to do. Yeah, we actually first did it in ’76, when I was twelve. And I did it again two years later with Allison Brown, same thing. The two of us and my dad. Same van! Yeah, that was probably the changing point, or the thing that kept me going, seeing J.D. Crowe’s band, and Keith Whitley was with him, and seeing Keith Whitley with Ralph two years before that… That’s what really got me into playing more traditional kinds of bluegrass, when I finally heard Ralph Stanley live. Let’s talk about your performing and your approach to your breaks. When you work up a new tune, do you work up a solo? To what extent are you improvising, to what extent are you relying on working up some ideas? I try to keep the shape of the melody in my mind, and depending on the way I think the lyrics of the tune fall, the song might dictate whether or not I add more blues to the idea, or more swing, or real traditional bluegrass, a little bit more anger or not, depending on the kind of song it is. Do you tend to play the same kind of solos night after night, do you get into a kind of groove with them? If I happen to remember something I’ve done in the last few shows or the night before, I might try it again if I can remember part of it, or something like it. But they’re pretty much…they come and go. So you run on ideas on the fly, as opposed to woodshedding at home, constructing a break…you’re not taking that approach. Not with bluegrass. If I’m playing with more complex tunes that have more advanced ideas… I’ve gone out on the road with Bela Fleck a few times. To work out some stuff for some of his tunes I have to think about chord progression, and spend some time figuring out ways to get from A to B, C to R. Do you feel like your playing is consistent? Do you have good days and bad days? Oh, yeah. Sometimes I end up having to play with a little bit of defense mechanism. If I feel like I’m having a bad day, I’ll end up playing less, or go out on a limb fewer times — keep it safer. When you have a bad day, is it intonation that you’re thinking about, or timing, or ideas? Ideas come slower. If I feel like I’m having a bad day, I usually try to play myself out of it. Positive thinking or whatever. Sometimes that works. When that doesn’t work, then I’ve really had a bad day. When you’re in the studio, do you have a different approach to soloing? Do you try to come more prepared in terms of ideas ahead of time? Let’s say you’re doing a Nashville Bluegrass Band session for your next album, are you going to go there and improvise on the spot for something that’s going to be kept? Yeah. It might cross my mind that, "Oh, I could have worked out something for this," but I never seem to. It seems like your recording career is in pretty high gear these days. Do you enjoy it? Yeah, it’s the greatest practice ever, to play with as many different musicians as I play with….
Pierre Schryer: Legendary Canadian FiddlerBy Charlie WaldenCanadian old-time fiddling has always fascinated me. The tradition shares many similarities to the music of my native Missouri: The playing style emphasizes clean, well-articulated bowing; Canadian hoe-downs and reels are "notey," melodically complex and played with drive suitable for square dancing; Canadians embrace other tune types in their repertoire, such as jigs, hornpipes, polkas, and waltzes. Over the past decade the name Schryer has become unalterably associated with the best of Canadian fiddling. Certainly Julien Schryer and Juliette Audet of Saulte Ste. Marie ("the Soo" for short), Ontario, could never have imagined the success their progeny would attain. Their first son, Patrick was a guitarist, followed by Raymond who became a fiddler and initially patterned his playing after his uncle Bud Schryer. In case of the fiddling Schryers, good things come in sets of three, namely the fiddling Schryer triplets –– Louis, Pierre and Dan –– who were born in 1968. All three along with older brother Raymond and sister Julie (Schryer-Lefebvre) on piano have enjoyed undisputed domination of competitive fiddling in Canada for ten years. Their accomplishment in winning major Canadian fiddling competitions amounted to nothing short of dynasty in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. They imitated and mastered the styles of the greatest Canadian fiddlers ever known, such as Graham Townsend, Ward Allen, Don Messer, and Jean Carignan. They also followed closely the music of Sean McGuire of Ireland, Jerry Holland of Cape Breton, and Americans Bobby Hicks, Mark O’Connor and Johnny Gimble. The compact disc release by the Schryer triplets (Triple Fiddle, The Schryer Triplets, Canada, 1993) is a remarkable display of combined and individual mastery of fiddling and showcases these many influences. In recent years the triplets have set about to make their individual marks on the world of traditional music. Pierre Schryer in particular has distinguished himself as a world class Celtic fiddler while still maintaining his Canadian roots. He worked for a time with older brother Raymond as a violin maker but has since set his tools aside in favor of a full-time career as a working musician. He has assembled a band which includes his sister Julie on piano, Brian Pickell on guitar, and multi-instrumentalist Nathan Curry, and is actively touring with this group in the company of step dancers Siobhn Reaney (Irish), Catherine MacLeod (Scottish Highland dancer) and Martin Dunheme (QuÚbec). Pierre’s recent activities include the release of a new CD entitled The New Canadian Waltz (1996 New Canadian Records) which features his band along with percussionist Brad Fremlin, a tour with British Columbia-based Celtic rock group Mad Pudding, and an Ireland tour this Spring which included representing Canada in a fiddle showcase in Limerick on March 22. Pierre also excels as an illustrator (he created a self-portrait in watercolor for the cover of his new CD), and has had numerous local showings of his artwork. Were there any other fiddlers in your family? All your siblings are musicians, aren’t they? Yes, my oldest brother Patrick played guitar. There’s my uncle, Bud Schryer. He played fiddle and was well known in the Saulte Ste. Marie area. He was an old-time fiddler and admired people like Don Messer. He played for the dances here and was inducted into the fiddlers Hall of Fame. He provided a lot of good music for the people here, mainly for the square dances. Also, my dad recalls his father playing fiddle but I never got to hear him. My dad played guitar and used to sing to us when we were kids. I remember you mentioning once that you grew up speaking French. Yeah. Actually, we went to school from Kindergarten on in French School and our high school was a French immersion program. French is not that strong among the population in the Soo [Saulte Ste. Marie]. But it was always strong in our family. My mom is from QuÚbec. But you were born in the Soo? That’s right. April 13, 1968…. Who was your biggest influence when you were starting out? That would have to be my older brother Raymond. He went off to school in Toronto and came back with some great tapes and records and let us use them and listen to them. I play a lot with Julie, my sister, these different styles of fiddling. Raymond introduced us to the different styles that were out there. He was into Irish, Scottish, Shetland, and he was bringing it all home –– even some American stuff. Of course the real learning was happening with the triplets. We sort of bounced things off of each other. We all started at the same age; we were eight years old. We were classically trained at the same time we were going to fiddle contests. This went on through the time we were eighteen or so. Where were you studying violin? At the Conservatory. There’s a conservatory here in the Soo, the Algoma Conservatory of Music at Algoma University. That’s where I teach now. I teach traditional fiddle playing. I also have a number of private students. When the triplets were playing against each other I guess you first had to compete against older brother Raymond. No, not really. Raymond is seven years older than the rest of us so he was in a different category in the competitions. So the triplets were competing against each other? That’s right. It was only in the later years that we played against Raymond. The triplets competed in the twelve and under category and went up through the different categories and then into the Open. We started into the Open as early as age sixteen. It was friendly rivalry. That wasn’t too common, was it? No, but it’s happening more and more. It seems like the young ones are learning really, really quick. I’ve noticed that down here. Kids are getting hotter much faster these days. Yeah. There’s so much access to CDs and tapes around, and teachers. They’re all into it. They can get really good at twelve and compete in the Open at age fifteen or sixteen and do well. It’s almost scary! In a way you set the standard for this sort of thing in Canada. That’s what happened with us. There were three of us doing it. Raymond’s generation started this evolution and the standard of playing was changing. And I think our generation has evolved the competition style a bit. How would you say the music is different today from fifteen years ago at a competition like Shelburne? Well, we’d hear more intricate and more complex tunes. People are not afraid of playing their own compositions, too. Are other genres of music coming into the competitions, such as American contest fiddling or Irish music? Well, there are people coming from all over to compete but the emphasis is still on the old-time Canadian fiddling. That’s what the contests are supposed to help preserve. There are other styles creeping in, especially the origins, like Scottish and Irish. We’ve done it subtly into the Canadian style. The most pervasive thing down here is the style espoused by Mark O’Connor. Is that style finding its way into Canadian fiddle competitions? Yes. There are quite a few who look up to Mark. There are many players who imitate him, including myself. The thing with Mark O’Connor is he’s sort of changed things and set a style there, a standard I guess. I’ve attended his fiddle camp. In a way, you guys did the same thing in Canadian fiddling competitions. Raised the bar, sort of, for the rest of the fiddlers. One result of this is that it’s much tougher for judges now. They have to be of a higher caliber so they can understand the changes of standard. You mean you could play a complicated tune well and play over the heads of the judges if they don’t understand what it is you are trying to do? That’s it exactly. The fiddle contests have got to evolve to some extent. Not too much though; there’s a standard or tradition they have to follow. A subtle change throughout the years is good. [To order Pierre’s CD The New Canadian Waltz, call 1-800-JOE RADIO (or 1-416-445-2500).]
Woody Paul: Fiddling the Cowboy WayBy Michael Simmons1997 marks the 20th anniversary of the cowboy trio Riders in the Sky. Who could have predicted that when the trio –– Ranger Doug (Idol of America’s Youth), Woody Paul (King of the Cowboy Fiddlers) and Too Slim (Man of a Thousand Slogans) –– started performing the music of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and the other singing cowboys (in the dark days of disco and punk rock, no less) that they would not only survive, but flourish and prosper. The Riders’ combination of humor and sterling musicianship helped reintroduce classic cowboy music to popular culture and paved the way for the current western music renaissance. Along the way they have released over fifteen albums, starred in two different TV series (Riders in the Sky on CBS and Rider Radio Theater on TNN) and produced their own radio show for NPR, all while playing over 200 shows a year. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Riders’ longevity is that they have managed to thrive with a split personality. Many people aren’t quite sure how to take them. Are the Riders in the Sky a comedy group that sings or musicians that tell jokes? Because they are so funny, folks tend to ignore their strong musical talents. On their two recent releases on Rounder Records (Public Cowboy #1: The Music of Gene Autry and Always Drink Upstream from The Herd) the Riders show the world that they are first and foremost musicians. On these two CDs, Ranger Doug, Too Slim and Woody Paul leave the jokes in the bunkhouse and do what they do best: sing western songs with impeccable harmony. Maybe this return to basics will get the band the respect they deserve as musicians. Woody Paul in particular seems to be overlooked as a fiddler. His playing is always melodic with a sweet, singing tone, and his fills and turnarounds are always inventive. On the trio’s rare instrumentals he reveals himself to be one of the best western swing fiddlers currently drawing a bow. I recently got to spend some time talking to Woody. He was charming in the best southern fashion and a delight to talk with. Woody Paul grew up on a farm near Franklin, Tennessee, in a musical family. His father, who was the teacher in a one-room school house, played banjo, guitar and a little fiddle. He would play parties and dances around the county. When he was eleven years old, Woody found an old Sears and Roebuck fiddle in the closet. One Christmas, his father set it up and got him a book on how to play the violin. From there Woody pretty much taught himself to play. "It didn’t take me but a little while to write my first song," he recalls. "I wish I still had it." With a dearth of local players to learn from, Woody’s early influences came over the radio and television. "I just wanted to play the fiddle and I figured that I could do it. Every morning before school the Eddie Hill Show was on. I used to listen to Benny Martin and Cecil Brower. They were the main ones." Along with Martin’s bluegrass and Brower’s western swing fiddling, Woody was picking up other influences that would later appear in pieces like "Concerto for Violin and Longhorns." He remembered a fellow from Alabama who had an early morning show who would "bray like a mule and play the fiddle." Woody had an obvious love of music so his mother bought him a record player and he spent hours listening to players like Howdy Forrester and Tommy Jackson. He learned to play tunes by slowing the turntable down to 16 rpm, a technique that is lost to us in the compact disc era. When he was thirteen, he started hanging around with his neighbors Sam and Kirk McGee. The McGees were early country music pioneers. They appeared on the Grand Ole Opry starting in the ’20s backing up legends like Uncle Dave Macon and Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith and with their string band the Fruit Jar Drinkers. Sam McGee would take the young Woody Paul with him to Nashville for his Opry performances. "I used to hang out back stage. Roy Acuff gave me a fiddle when I graduated from high school and told me never to get into the music business" For full versions of these articles, please visit Fiddler Magazine store to order back issues. |
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