Winter 2007/08
Features
Columns
- Fiddle Tune History: Surviving Playford, by Andrew Kuntz
- The Practicing Fiddler: Non-exercises, by Hollis Taylor
- Bluegrass Fiddling: Dale Potter, by Paul Shelasky
- On Improvisation: Understandable Theory, by Paul Anastasio
- Cross-Tuning Workshop: EDAE – Luther Strong, by Jody Stecher
- Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour: Ontario’s Brian Hebert, by Gordon Stobbe
- Reviews
(The Irish Fiddler column will be back in the next issue)
Tunes in this Issue
- Paddy Fahey’s, transcribed by Paul Cranford as played by Oisin McAuley
- Tuffan Masurkka, transcribed by Jussi Tarkkanen
- Emman Häävalssi, transcribed by Juhani Tiainen
- Soldier’s Joy, arrangement for fiddle orchestra by Jim Wood
- Rabbit, Where’s Your Mammy? Transcribed by Hollis Taylor (Practicing Fiddler)
- The Frost Is All Over (Fiddle Tune History)
- Hey to the Camp (Fiddle Tune History)
- Untitled Air (Fiddle Tune History)
- The Mask (Fiddle Tune History)
- Time Changes Everything, transcribed by Paul Shelasky as played by Dale Potter (Bluegrass Fiddling)
- Glory in the Meeting House, transcribed by Jody Stecher as played by Luther Strong (Cross-Tuning Workshop)
- Sunset on the Ottawa, by Brian Hebert (Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour)
Article Excerpts
 Photo: Matt Guillory
Oisín McAuley: No Strings Attached
By Helene Dunbar
“When you’re a fiddle player with a band like Danú, which is very, very traditional in a lot of ways, people expect that you’re going to come back with something that’s very traditional. They simply don’t know anything else about you,” explains Oisín McAuley, Danú’s fiddle player, about his debut solo album Far from the Hills of Donegal.
Much of the critical focus on McAuley’s first effort has revolved around the album’s unexpected eclecticism. Geographically, the music moves from his native Donegal to Sligo, Brittany, and Quebec but McAuley’s musical background, which is more diverse than many realize, also allows him to move stylistically from traditional to jazz, bluegrass, and classical.
There are many differences in terms of techniques when it comes to classical music versus traditional, so many that most musicians find that they have to choose one or the other so as not to negatively alter their bowing. Yet McAuley has always fluctuated between the two. “I did both at the same time for years and years,” he says. “I started off with traditional and my high school education was all classical, because I was doing all the kind of great things that kids do at that age but then in college I got back into traditional again and then I gave up classical pretty much. It’s been a real mixed bag and in the end I started getting interested in jazz and some other things so I ended up with a bit of a melting pot. But it’s been handy for me, the classical, for technique and the traditional has been handy to sort of fit in with anything that’s going.”
Even though McAuley has been mixing the styles for years, he understands why most musicians find it difficult. “You’ll often find classical players trying to pick up traditional music because they get interested in it and some of them, whether they want to give up on classical music or they just want to try new things, they then try world music, jazz, Celtic music or whatever it is and they find themselves lost very quickly,” he explains. “Even though they’re very accomplished in classical music, they’re not able to pick up music by ear very well and their technique tends to be very rigid. It doesn’t lend itself to some of the faster playing that you need for traditional music. But then again you often find traditional musicians sitting in on a gig where there’s maybe a singer and it’s a little more middle of the road and they find themselves absolutely lost; maybe unpolished; out of tune. Each background has a part of the jigsaw in my opinion.”
Growing up, McAuley was raised in Irish-speaking Carrick County, Donegal. Taking up the fiddle at nine, he was following in a family tradition. “My grandfather played the fiddle, and he’d often give bed and board to fiddlers, just to hear tunes in the house,” he recalled. “Everybody in my family played or sang. We all did traditional and classical –– in my case it was on the same instrument –– but my older brothers, one of them was an accordion player and clarinet player and the other was a cello player and piano player. They had separate instruments they played on whereas I played the one thing. We also have a strong tradition of sean-nós singing in our family. That kind of keeps you grounded in traditional –– everything goes back to that in a way.” He was also highly influenced by famed Donegal fiddler John Doherty. “You’ll hear a lot of John Doherty on this record, both his music and his style,” McAuley says. “He mixed up and changed things a lot, so in a way it was easier for me to mix up different types of tunes.”
…
From university he went on to play with Stockton’s Wing, Cran, Alan Kelly, Hot Club of Dublin, and other bands, teach, and spend a year immersed in the music of Brittany. “I’d always wanted to pick up Breton music,” explains McAuley. “In Belfast, in sessions, as anyone who has ever been there will tell you, they all play a load of Breton music –– they’ve got a weird sort of fascination with it, and if you’re even in Brittany you’ll notice they all ask you “do you know…” all these Belfast flute players or fiddle players. There’s a weird connection there; a very strong bond
between Belfast and Brittany that I was fascinated with. So I headed over for a trip and stayed for a year.”
In 2001, though, McAuley joined the ever-popular Danú (other current band members are Benny McCarthy, accordion/melodeon; Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, vocals/flute/tin whistles; Tom Doorley, flute/whistles/backing vocals; Éamon Doorley, bouzouki/fiddle; Dónal Clancy, guitar). In true Irish traditional fashion, his entrance into the super group was the product of years of playing music with different people in different settings. “I had three years of messing around and playing with all sorts of different people after I left college. One of those people was Benny (McCarthy). You have to know that at sessions it’s a really interchangeable thing. You always end up playing with the people you end up doing a bit of work with. That’s how it works, word of mouth. It’s so interchangeable that you can just sit in all together and you kind of know what things work before you ask people. Whereas in a jazz session, you don’t know until the people sit down together and rehearse. We were kind of in that tradition where they knew to give me a buzz if they were looking for a fiddle player so the time came when Jessie Smith, the previous fiddle player, wanted to do different things and I got a call.”
In more recent years, Danú has become less time-consuming for McAuley. “We used to tour over 200 concerts a year and now we’re down to the odd concerts in March and a little bit in the summer but most of us are married now and there are children involved so we haven’t been able to do the kind of touring we used to do.” And then there’s the cost. “It’s a very expensive band to put on the road in terms of lights and because we’re all over the place ourselves. We’re happy, though –– we don’t want to go back to living on the road.”
The lightened Danú schedule meant that McAuley has been able to focus on his solo work. And when it came time to pull the album together, he was more concerned with recording tunes that matter to him with musicians who matter to him than with genre. “I have a huge repertoire of stuff that I play and week to week it changes depending on how I’m feeling. Also, you play tunes with a certain musician and that sort of makes up who you are and sets you aside from the next person you’re playing with. It’s not that it’s an improvement on anything, just kind of what your identity is. This album is like a mosaic of what I’ve been doing…I’ve been more all over the place than [anyone would] have expected.”
He stresses that even though it is currently in style to host a large number of guest artists, his inclusion of them was for more personal reasons. “Usually there’s a collection of stuff, everyone goes away and rehearses it all together. This isn’t like that. These are the guys who mean an awful lot to me; who I’ve played with and have built associations with over the last fifteen years. It was like a tour of their houses sort of thing.”
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[For the rest of this interview, as well as the tune “Paddy Fahey’s” as played by Oisín on Far from the Hills of Donegal, subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!
[Helene Dunbar has written about traditional music for Fiddler Magazine, Irish Music Magazine, Scotland Magazine, and a variety of newspapers.]
 Photo: Connie Cook
Mitch Jayne: The Dillards’ Wordsmith on Fiddler’s Ghost and Legends of Fiddledom
By Kevin Cook
One of bluegrass music’s most learned and articulate ambassadors, Mitch Jayne made an indelible impression as the Dillards’ pipe-puffing bassist and resident raconteur, ever ready to engross an audience with a kneeslapping story when a guitar string broke or a banjo went out of tune. Mitch’s pastoral lyrics have graced a raft of bluegrass standards (“Dooley,” “The Old Home Place,” “There Is a Time,” “The Whole World ’Round”), but he is also a distinguished short story writer, novelist, and humorist with an uncanny gift for putting the poetic –– and often perplexingly rustic –– nuances of Ozark English into a context few can resist laughing along with. Fiddler’s Ghost, his new novel published by Wildstone Media, concerns a genteel spirit, limbo-lost since the Civil War, who is befriended by a young Ozark couple in the 1950s and, through his mentorship of a gifted black musician, discovers the key to his ghostly wandering. Interviewed via email from his home in Eminence, a hamlet in the Missouri Ozarks where he lives with his wife, Diana, a marvelous artist who painted the book’s evocative cover, Mitch talked about his book, the Dillards, and the many extraordinary fiddlers he’s been privileged to know.
What inspired you to write “Hiram,” the first draft of “Fiddler’s Ghost”?
When my log house in the woods burned, the week before Christmas of 1980, I found myself, at fifty-one, without anything, including a livelihood. Fires being thorough erasers of personal history, I no longer had the tools of my trade, evidence of my previous work or even a way to start over again. What I did have –– and all survivors know this truth –– were friends. In the weeks it took to replace even the most elemental things of living, one of these friends gave me an old Underwood typewriter, a couple of ribbons and a ream of paper. People gave us lots of things back then, putting our lives back into some kind of order, but this typewriter was a gift of purpose, and when I had, at last, a table to put it on, I began a book about a man worse off than me, who has lost his life, and searches through time for its meaning.
My mind was a mish-mash of loss back then and I wrote neither easily –– nor soberly, to tell the truth –– nor very well, but I stayed at it, hoping my ghost would be an acceptable idea, and knowing I could fix my hurried faults if a publisher liked it. I was as poor in money as I was rich in friends and I needed to repay their faith as much as pay my debts. If I had known I would need twenty-five years and a renewal of my own faith to turn my story into Fiddler’s Ghost, I would probably have worked at “Hiram” anyway. I needed so badly to write and show my friends I still had spirit and belief.
Tell me about the book’s musical theme.
Obviously, my own forty-year career playing music with the Dillards has everything to do with trying to write about what I know best when it comes to background. We played bluegrass, which to us was the most American music we knew, but we knew its roots, like its instruments, ran deeper than that, coming over the water from places like Ireland and even Africa, much like its players. Bluegrass’ songs came mostly from the mountain places –– a high, lonesome sound that distinguished them from gentle country and simple living. We knew better than to think we played the only American music, but like Hiram, my ghost, we searched for what it might turn out to be, and the fun was in the looking.
Why did you make Hiram a fiddler, rather than some other kind of musician?
Because violins are ghostly creatures themselves to me, creating emotions of their own and an atmosphere around themselves. Best of all, they capture time in a way that’s almost visual. Try that on a banjo!
Hiram plays a 1730 Guarnerius violin. How did you choose that particular instrument?
I heard my first Guarnerius played by our old friend Byron Berline, the amazing fiddler with whom the Dillards recorded the first album he had ever played on, Pickin’ & Fiddlin’. After that, we used Byron every time we needed a fiddler to record and he was available, and on one of these sessions he appeared with this marvelous violin, bought for him by his father. Byron never ceased to amaze us. He was a big, rawboned Oklahoma boy and in those days looked like a football player, not a fiddler. Seeing that delicate antique in his huge hands was a shock, but nothing compared to the one I got when he drew his bow across those strings and brought a voice from a time before this land became a country, to play “Hamilton County Breakdown.” I get goose bumps just remembering, especially now that I realize Hamilton County was my ghost’s home in Tennessee and time travel is a cinch for anything as lasting as music.
What do you remember about recording “Pickin’ & Fiddlin’” with Byron?
I remember that I was a new bass player trying to capture a very old and complicated music and that for this recording, a more accomplished studio musician was used on bass. I didn’t mind a bit –– I knew that on this album with Byron, it was important to preserve the tunes, not sell them to our audiences, which was pretty much my function. I sat back and listened in wonder.
Did Byron enjoy pushing the bluegrass envelope as much as the Dillards did?
Byron was always wide open for invention and welcomed challenge. I expect that’s the reason Rodney (Dillard), the Dillards’ designer, found Byron’s fiddle so comfortable to use. We were spending our days looking for new ways to harness bluegrass and bring it into the light, and Byron, I think, felt that same urge to project his fiddle on a bigger screen than was there for audiences that took a bluegrass fiddler for granted. Byron, these days, has been all over the world and has proved –– to my great satisfaction –– that fiddles speak a universal language, whatever the local speech.
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[For the rest of this interview, including Mitch’s recollections of John Hartford, Gene Goforth, and other fiddlers, subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!]
[Kevin Cook of McDonough, Georgia, is a writer and book editor who plays the guitar middlingly and the mandolin badly. He has a scholarly interest in the music of the Dillards and the writings of Mitch Jayne.]
[To order Fiddler’s Ghost, send check/money order for $15.00 + $3.50 s&h to: Wildstone Media, P. O. Box 270238, St. Louis, MO 63127, or call 800-296-1918 during business hours to order with MC/Visa. Also available at: http://www.wildstonemedia.comand www.amazon.com.]
Sharing the Joy: The Tennessee Fiddle Orchestra
By Jim Wood
I was exceptionally fortunate to have grown up right down the road from Buddy Spicher, the undisputed master of twin fiddle harmony, and the sound of stringed instruments was forever imprinted on my brain as the ultimate musical experience. Buddy also plays viola and cello, and we used to sit around his house playing fiddle tunes and swing standards in various combinations of fiddle with the lower stringed instrument voices. This was the beginning of my dream of someday playing in a “fiddle” orchestra. I put myself through college playing viola in my collegiate orchestra, and I played for years in numerous “pick up” orchestras on commercial gigs. A few years ago I learned of the Scottish fiddle orchestra tradition. After a year of considering it seriously, my wife Inge and I and our friend Harry Hill set the wheels in motion and this fall formed the Tennessee Fiddle Orchestra, which meets at Motlow State Community College in Lynchburg, Tennessee.
The orchestra consists of fiddles, violas, cellos, and string basses and is open to anyone interested. Making this experience as inclusive as possible has been our first priority, so I write arrangements of old time, Celtic, and folk tunes (along with a hymn or two and a couple of Christmas carols) that accommodate a very wide range of skill. As you can see in the excerpt from our arrangement of a medley of “Soldier’s Joy/Turkey in the Straw/Going Across the Sea,” the technical demands range from relatively difficult [at full speed ahead (120 beats per minute)] for a community orchestra with Violin 1 to very simple (but musically effective, nonetheless) with Violin 4. The idea is to create a musical environment where anybody and everybody can come together and share in the unadulterated joy of making music in this wonderful and unique context. We have folks from the classical tradition who want to branch out into something new and fun, and we have fiddlers who have never had an experience in any sort of ensemble other than a bluegrass or old time string band, and it all seems to work out beautifully.
A friend of mine, Don Ralph, started a string orchestra in the mid- 1970s in Leitchfield, Kentucky, where he was at the time superintendent of schools. This begot a fiddle tradition in the surrounding area that, to this day, makes Grayson County, Kentucky, one of the great fiddle epicenters in the United States, with many of the best fiddlers in the country of the past three decades having grown up there. Taking this as our inspiration, Inge and I would like to see the same thing happen here around Flat Creek, Tennessee, and we feel we are off to a good start, with forty-six musicians participating in our first semester. To put things in perspective, Flat Creek itself has two pages in the Bedford County phone book. You can do this wherever you are, and this is the main message that I want to communicate. Fiddling makes the world a better place, and you can help to promote a culture of fiddling in your community. Hopefully, the Tennessee Fiddle Orchestra will inspire you to explore this opportunity in your area.
[To see Jim’s arrangement of “Soldier’s Joy” for the Tennessee Fiddle Orchestra, subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!]
http://www.tennesseefiddleorchestra.com
[Jim Wood is a five-time Tennessee Fiddle Champion who performs on fiddle, mandolin, banjo, and guitar with his wife Inge. Their CD “Jim and Inge Wood in Concert: September 24, 2005” was given a rave review in the Fall 2006 issue of Fiddler Magazine. For more information on recordings, concerts, and workshops, please see Jim’s website at http://www.JimWoodMusic.net.]
 Leikarit (Jussi Tarkkanen top left)
Finland’s Jussi Tarkkanen, An interview
by Peter Anick
When he’s not doing research on cervical cancer, Helsinki University Hospital pathologist Jussi Tarkkanen can often be found playing the violin or mandolin for dances and parties as a member of one of Helsinki’s folk music ensembles. He has pursued his hobby for over thirty years, accumulating a large repertoire of tunes and a long list of players whom he can tap when he needs to pull together a band for an event. He plays with Leikarit, a venerable institution that has appeared many times at the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival and recently visited America to perform at the Finn Grandfest in Michigan. In this interview, he describes some of his musical influences and muses on the role of a dance band in modern-day Helsinki.
Jussi: My father plays the accordion and he used to play dances. I think that’s how I got the exposure to old time music. I played the classical violin and decided I wanted to play folk dances. Back in ’76, ’77, I met some people and started a band.
How did you go about making the transition from classical to folk fiddle?
I grew up here in Helsinki, listening to rock and Jimi Hendrix. There was a guy from the countryside who studied here and I learned a few tunes from him. He had learned from the old guys. And I heard some old-timers at the Kaustinen festival. When I started to play old time music, I traveled to Kaustinen that same summer and since then I’ve been to Kaustinen every summer.
Kaustinen seems to be the center of folk music in Finland.
They are the best organized. They have a good school, a high school featuring lots of music, and the festival. The Folk Music Institute is located in Kaustinen and they publish notebooks and recordings. It’s very active. Now we have the Sibelius Academy here in Helsinki and in Tampere they have a folk music school. But to a great extent, it has been people from Kaustinen who have been setting this up.
So how did you go about putting a band together?
I asked my friends, and they knew some people. Some have left and some have stayed, you know. I usually collect people who, if there’s a dance or wedding coming up, I can phone up and ask who has a possibility of coming. Maybe twenty or thirty people from which to choose for a gig.
Everybody knows the same repertoire?
That’s a problem. If I call this guy, then I have to figure out who will be the next one, and try to figure out if they know the same repertoire.
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What instruments do you need for a dance?
I need to have at least two guys with me who can play the melodies, to take turns, maybe accordion and clarinet. It is too tiring to play the melody all night, too monotonous to listen to.
Is that how it’s evolved, then? Didn’t the fiddle use to play all night?
Yeah, I think that’s the old style. Now we have people to play the harmonies.
When you have more than one fiddle, what do you play, unison?
Yes, the old style is to play unison. That’s quite difficult, in fact. When we play unison, we also rehearse in advance, because then it has to sound like one fiddle. You have to do the bowings in exactly the same way. We decide together how it’s going to sound. If we have more violins than two or three, then we just let people do what they want. Sometimes it sounds good, sometimes it doesn’t.
Who gets to call the tunes?
If it’s a wedding, we decide in advance who is responsible. He has to take care that everyone knows the music. Most of the people read music. If you have an original piece with a lot of different chords or something special happening, it’s much faster to have the music written down.
…
What were the main influences on the music of Helsinki?
It had a lot of influence from the Swedish culture. There was a Swedish-speaking minority here and most of the melodies have a Swedish tone. They are happy melodies. Maybe the minor key tunes come from the Russian influence? The Finnish mentality is very minor-oriented in its music.
Why is that?
I don’t know. Maybe it’s the melancholic nature of the people. [laughs] It’s also quite emotional music.
Konsta Jylha
Do you know Konsta Jylha by name? On my list of favorites, I always compare Konsta Jylha with, let’s say, another extreme, Jimi Hendrix. Because I think he’s the great guy of Finnish folk music. He died in the ’80s. He lived in Kaustinen and the Kaustinen Festival grew around him. He has written very nice melodies. He used to be quite popular but then people played his melodies so frequently that he went out of fashion. So now we have to wait a few years to hear them again. He wrote a nice schottische, for example. [Plays the schottische.] He combines the minor and major keys. They are very strong melodies.
So Konsta was a focal point of the folk revival in Finland?
Yes, his group which played in the ’70s –– they would play in the rock festival, these old guys. I met him once in the ’80s and I always remember his eyes. He’d look straight into your eyes very keenly. He was very special. He used to be like a typical fiddler, partying in the pubs, but later on he turned religious and started composing music for religious occasions. His religious tunes are quite popular with choirs. Even now some tunes of his which nobody has played are being found. They have been written down and published in a book. Since he was overplayed, though, many younger bands don’t play them. And since they are so melodic, you have to play them the way they were written. Other types of melodies give more room for playing around.
Are there other influential fiddlers with similar stature?
Otto Hotakainen
(Otto) Hotakainen, he’s the great polka guy, the number one polka guy. It takes a lot of old time style in bowing to get the polka
really swinging. You have to do it in the right way to have it sound good. He would play it from here (holding the fiddle against his chest). His fast melodies compare, perhaps, to bluegrass.
Did many Finnish fiddlers play holding the fiddle low against the chest?
No, not that I know of. He also has a [tune] book out. Somebody wrote down his tunes, but those tunes have to be played the right way. Most of the students at Sibelius Academy have picked him as a favorite and play his polkas and polskas also. Around five years ago, I heard some younger groups start to play his melodies, which nobody played earlier because they were technically so difficult that nobody knew how to play them well.
But he himself wasn’t classically trained, was he?
No, he was a farmer. He was a natural talent. He lived in the Kaustinen region and had his best moments at the Kaustinen Festival in the ’70s. That’s where people found him and he was a sensation immediately. At that time, not too many fiddlers played old music. He played solo with a kantele or accordion, because no other fiddler could play with him.
[For the full text of this interview, as well as the tunes “Tuffan Masurkka” and “Emman Häävalssi,” and an interview with Finland’s Emilia Lajunen, subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!]
[Jussi plays violin and mandolin on a 1999 CD (JOT-2) of his own folk-dance compositions called Viipurista Itään. Leikarit (http://www.leikarit.fi) is planning to release a new CD shortly.]
[Peter Anick, co-author of Mel Bay’s “Old-Time Fiddling Across America,” plays fiddle with the Massachusetts bluegrass band Wide Open Spaces (http://www.wideospaces.com).]
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