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Winter 1997/1998Articles
Tunes
ARTICLE EXCERPTS
Irish Fiddler James Kelly: A Matter of TraditionBy Hollis Payer
James Kelly is one of the most respected fiddlers
playing traditional Irish music today. Through his many recordings, his
involvement in such well known performing groups as Planxty and Patrick
Street, and his teaching work in Irish music schools and festivals around
the world, he has touched and inspired legions of musicians and music lovers.
James' roots in the music run deep. He grew up in a musical household during
a time of heightened interest in traditional music in Ireland. Like his
father, John, before him, James is a font of information about tunes and
anecdotes of characters who formed the tradition, and a fierce advocate
of the music. Tell me about the musical legacy you inherited from your father [John Kelly]. Well, I suppose to start at the very beginning –– who said that, Julie Andrews? –– my father was a musician, a fiddle player and a concertina player from a very rural part of County Clare, in the west of Ireland. He grew up where people didn't travel away very much, in fact they hardly ever traveled away. You had all your influences from the area you lived in, and the style of music that he played, of course, was a very traditional style. His concertina music, although he played the same dance tunes as he played on the fiddle, were settings for the concertina and he kept it separate, lovely ideas. He left County Clare in his late twenties and worked in the Bob of Allen, just outside Dublin. He met my mother and they got married in 1945 and set up a shop in Dublin, a little shop in Capel Street called The Horse Shoe. And they started a family. I was the youngest of five children and everybody was a musician in the house including my mother who tipped a little bit on the accordion. Everybody else was a fiddle player in the family –– six fiddlers. We had one piper, my brother Anthony who was also a fiddle player, but he was more a piper than a fiddler. We grew up together learning tunes, listening to tunes, old recordings, 78s, and tapes, and being visited by just an endless string of musicians, it seems. How did it happen that there was this scene at your house? Was that from your father's old connections? My father was one of the elder statesmen in the music, so to speak, a musician that people looked up to and revered. They respected his opinion very highly. He was an old-fashioned man –– if you met him you'd think he was from the last century, he had this ancient feeling about him. He had a lot of knowledge about the music in him and if he responded to you favorably, you knew that you were doing something right within the tradition itself. Musicians loved to come to the house, they knew there'd always be a good welcome and they'd hear some music and talk. Through the years they made friends with a lot of people –– he would travel a lot within Ireland itself, and he got to know a lot of people. People who didn't know him would come anyway. So your house and the shop became this gathering point. It wasn't as if at any time there were twenty people standing outside the front door, it was just a place that people would come to if they came to Dublin. You'd usually nip in to The Horse Shoe to see John Kelly and my mother Frances. You'd have a great time. My father was a storyteller, a historian, and it was all natural for him because he came from the soil, he came from the West. He was kind of serious in his own way but very funny in another way. He'd always have a few nice tunes and a good welcome in the house and that. I grew up looking at all these people, not knowing exactly who a lot of them were. I might have known their names as a child, but not realizing how important these people were until I got older. Who were some of these people, and why were they important? People like Seamus Ennis for example. Seamus was a great uillean piper, storyteller, writer, and fluent Irish speaker. He had a great knowledge of the music, worked for the BBC, and collected songs around England, Scotland and Ireland as well. Willie Clancy was another great friend of my father and mother. Willie would stay at our place and when we'd go to County Clare we'd stay with him. We wouldn't have much, our accommodations were two rooms, two beds in the room, four kids in the bed, so if people came up for a few days and they didn't have a place to stay, you'd just do the best you could. Sometimes there'd be Darach O'Cathain the singer, and Joe Heaney, before he went over to live in America, Bobby Casey, Joe Ryan, Neillidh O'Boyle. When Johnny Doran would come to Dublin he'd always come into the house. Johnny Doran liked my mother's brown bread. He'd sit with her upstairs, because at that time, after World War II, they had to keep the shop open late to try and make a bit of money because the money was scarce. Just anybody might come down. Dennis Murphy, Julia Clifford, Johnny Leary, whoever. How did you learn tunes? Did you ever play for these people? As a young kid I was very shy. But I'd play a little bit and they'd play in the house. We'd learn tunes that way, listening; my father would teach us a few tunes. If you have relations or family or people close by who are doing the same thing, a little bit of competition or rivalry can be good because you're trying to do what the other people are doing, and there's great excitement when everybody's doing the same thing. I was always struggling to do what my eldest brother Michael would do. "I can't do those triplets, I wonder what he's doing there..." It took me a long time, but I was after them, so it was great. Through your father and from your own experiences, you have particular insight into changes that have occurred in the culture and the traditional music of Ireland. What do you see from your perspective? To go back a bit, before the 1930s, in Ireland people would get together in the rural parts of the country at the crossroads and the house dances and have their own social activities, dances, stories and songs. A family in the locality might have an old gramophone player, and when some of the 78 records would come from the States, it was like going to Disneyland! People would get together at whoever's house it would be and they'd listen to this record over and over and over again. It was a great time for excitement, you know. So that was going on when the early recordings were coming into Ireland from the States and the musicians who were making those recordings were becoming influential because they were making recordings° no one had made them before. Then in the '30s, there was a bit of a switch and the clergy in Ireland at the time played a role in that. They started to discourage the crossroad dances and the country dances and encourage people to go to the bigger towns and villages into these halls. In a sense it kind of put a stop to all that stuff, you know. The music itself went through a period in the '40s and '50s where there wasn't much going on at all. In a lot of cases people just played in their own homes –– you might invite people in, get together and play. It wasn't as if you'd go for a festival like you would these days. I was born in 1957. In Dublin in the late '50s, there were two plays going on. One of them was called The Song of the Anvil, and there were two groups of musicians together for those plays. One was a man called Sean O'Riada, and some of the other musicians were my father, Paddy Moloney, Michael Tubridy, Martin Fahey, Ronnie McShane, Sonny Brogan and Eamon DeBuitleir. Out of all that came the idea to form a group, which wasn't done before. Technically speaking, the idea of actually arranging folk music, or dance music, had been done on at least one or two 78 recordings that I have, but they were folk tunes done in a classical way, highly orchestrated. And I presume they were classical musicians. But in this case, they were all traditional musicians who called themselves Ceoltoiri Culainn. Ceoltoiri is the Gaelic word for musicians, and Culainn is a place name, just outside Dublin. The idea of the band was to present traditional songs with accompaniment and traditional dance tunes and slow airs, arranged with instruments: harpsichord, bodhran, piano, fiddle, flute, pipes, whistles. Sean O'Riada himself started to dig up the music of Turlough O'Carolan, and Ceoltoiri Culainn introduced the music of O'Carolan for the first time. How did people respond to this new style of music? When it started off, a lot of the traditional musicians in Dublin were
absolutely confused, they couldn't figure it out at all. Particularly when
they got the first bit of air play on the radio, because at that time the
idea of doing a radio broadcast was something unusual, something very special.
Some people liked it from the first, and others thought it was modern, they
didn't like the ideas. Sean O'Riada himself probably was criticized because
he was a musician with a jazz and classical background. In 1963, out of
Ceoltoiri Culainn came the Chieftains, under the leadership of Paddy Moloney. Jay Ungar: Infecting the World with Fiddle FeverBy Peter Anick
How did you first react to this (folk) music when you heard it? When I was in high school (the High School of Music and Art in New York City), I was interested in all kinds of music in a very peripheral way. I didn’t get deeply into anything but classical music, which was what I had taken lessons in and was playing in high school. But there were so many other musical people that I wound up hearing more than had been available in the 1950s in the Bronx. One friend in particular, had a bunch of Flatt and Scruggs and Stanley Brothers bluegrass albums. People would trade these things on reel to reel tapes in those days, because the albums were so hard to get in New York. That was when? That would be in the ’60s, like ’60 to ’63, when I really got attracted to that music. I think it was because I was a kid who grew up in New York City and didn’t really like the city, and that music came from somewhere else, and it was old. I wasn’t thrilled with the ’50s that we had just lived through, and it harkened back to an earlier time and a simpler life-style and all that sort of thing. It was fun and exciting, and there was improvisation involved. Some people say that there was improvising in Classical music during the Baroque period, but today there isn’t much. I enjoyed the idea of people having their own take on something, yet it being a tradition. An individual approach, and self-expression, yet having some connection to the past and to something meaningful –– like a rural environment, a simpler life style. Did you see the performers or did you just hear the records at that point? At that point, I was anxious to see and hear people. The first old-time musicians I got to see were the New Lost City Ramblers. They would recreate cuts from old 78s, in a sense, live on stage. Around that time, just after I got out of high school, I went to the Newport Folk Festival. Must have been the summer of ’64, I guess, or ’65, and that’s where I heard Bill Monroe and his band and a Cajun group with Dewey Balfa. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but I remember walking across a field, hearing them in the distance –– they were playing at a workshop stage –– and I just couldn’t believe the sound! It wasn’t that I loved it or hated it –– I was drawn to it magnetically. What is this?? And then when I got there and I watched them singing, these sounds in another language coming out of their mouths, I was really transported by it. A number of years later, early ’70s, I was in a band called the Putnam String County Band, with John Cohen (who was in the New Lost City Ramblers), my first wife, Lyn Hardy on guitar, and Abby Newton on cello. The name was a little bit of a joke, because we’d had a dance band called the Putnam County String Band with some of the same people. When we created this concert version of the band, we thought the name should be a little different. It was a bit of an albatross, because people always turned it around, or they’d call it the Putnam String Country Band, because "County Band" didn’t make sense. At any rate, being one of the few performing string bands in 1970 and ’71, we wound up getting a lot of work. As a result, I wound up meeting some really great players. That’s around when I met Dewey Balfa, when the Balfa Brothers were traveling and we were on the same festivals. I would get to play with Dewey, you know, at jam sessions late at night. He just loved to be playing till three, four in the morning with young people who were interested. And I remember it took many years before he gave me a nod of approval. He was really a natural teacher in the sense of always being ready to tell you when you’re not doing it right, but with encouragement to keep trying. I knew for sure that I didn’t have it at that point, but I had his approval to keep trying and knew he thought I could get it eventually! There wasn’t much said. He did that with a lot of people and mentored them that way. So he never showed you things? Oh, he would stop and show me something if I asked him. Sure. But a lot of times these were jam sessions where there were a lot of people and it wasn’t really appropriate to stop somebody and say, "What did you do there?" And it isn’t really the notes. So what is it? What I understand it to be is the subtlety of the rhythm, ’cause you can play one note, and if it’s in the right rhythm, it’s going to fit. I feel like if I don’t play Cajun music for a while, I have to put some mental effort into finding it again –– that rhythm. The more often and the more consistently I play it, the more easily I can just pick it up and do it. And when there are a bunch of people playing, I can drift into it and lock into it. But it’s not my full-time musical pursuit, so I’d say I run into problems now and then, you know, nailing it again. It takes me a little while. I think one thing that helped was playing for the dance classes here at Ashokan, where Molly and I would focus so carefully on putting the right rhythm out for the people learning Cajun dance. They couldn’t care less what the melody is or if you’re being inventive –– what they really need is that beat, with the right inflection to it. It’s not something that is easy to verbalize. It’s something you keep listening to, you keep trying to do it. I’ve tried not to analyze it too much myself, because I don’t think that helps me do it. I mean, basically, I have been listening to the rhythm section. What happened with Molly and I up here playing for a dance class, we knew we weren’t giving the teacher what was needed, so we listened to the bands at night, basically listening to the rhythm section and we’d also get out and dance. We tried to figure out what we were dancing to and make sure that was in there when we played. It’s more the accents and the emphasis in the rhythm, and it’s somewhat subtle. As far as it being right or not, each band and individual player will have their own little take on that. That’s why some people don’t like to play together, because they have a slightly different take on that rhythm. If you’re playing with a group of people, just getting it the same and grooving is the most important thing. Did you find that in the bands you were in? To try to find an agreement where the rhythm was? I’ve never been in a Cajun band as such; I try as a sit-in to be a chameleon, and lock into whatever they think is right. And that’s my job as a sit-in or side-man. But let’s say in Fiddle Fever, we would play some Cajun tunes, but I don’t think we ever did them in a way that would be satisfyingly great Cajun dance music. We were doing them for concert performance and for the fun and the energy of it. I tend now to think more of getting that really good Cajun groove when I play a Cajun tune. Fiddle Fever achieved its own kind of groove. We recorded a song I wrote called "Low Down Dirty Dog," which is basically a take-off on a traditional Cajun melody with original lyrics. And I love doing that one. Molly and I still perform that one, but much more like a traditional Cajun two-step. With Fiddle Fever we did it really fast, and it was sort of in between bluegrass and Cajun somewhere. That was the result of the combination of those five people at that time in their lives –– that’s how we did it. And it was fun. Audiences liked it. Fiddle Fever wasn’t really concerned with preserving anything, or doing it like anyone else. We were more interested in finding unique ways to do things, doing something that kept us amused and excited about it. That’s what it was about. And I really loved that band. It was fun to be in. Back when I was in my early teens I would go down to Greenwich Village in New York City and run into people who would play old-time music, folk music, bluegrass. Alan Block was around. He was the first fiddler I heard live. He had a sandal shop in New York City. And there was a scene of people who hung around a store called Fretted Instruments which was right next door to the Folklore Center. These were two little meccas for people interested in string-based folk music. Fretted Instruments –– Mark Silber ran that store –– had a wall of instruments and people would just take one down and have little jam sessions and it was wonderful. Next door at the Folklore Center, Izzy Young sponsored wonderful concerts right in the store. That’s where I first heard the Boys of the Lough. I developed a real close relationship with their fiddler, Aly Bain. This was the early ’70s. He wanted to learn Western Swing and American stuff, and I wanted to learn Scottish music. We kind of fed off each other that way –– playing Scottish laments and Bob Wills tunes till late into the night. We eventually did some recording together (Good Friends–Good Music by Boys of the Lough and Catskill Mountain Goosechase by Jay Ungar and Lyn Hardy). Aly has certainly been a big influence on my playing. So, getting back to those 1960s Greenwich Village jam sessions, I’d sometimes feel a certain, negative vibe if I would try to sit in. You know, people would kind of turn and their body language would say, "You’re not welcome." I kept trying to figure out what the clues were, you know. What you had to do to get it right. It wasn’t apparent. I felt with Dewey, you were always welcome, and he let you know what he needed for you to be welcome. I think, that’s a really important thing –– to help people get an entry into this. I see it as a goal of the camps at Ashokan. I think, in starting Ashokan, my feeling was to try to create a place where you could really be a beginner and you could learn the rules, in a safe environment where you’re not going to be at risk all the time socially. Of course everybody doesn’t get the message, and you can’t make this a really hard and fast concrete rule, because that doesn’t work. We just try to engender that kind of environment for people. It should be a comfortable place for people who are professionals and great players as well –– a place where people of all levels of expertise can be together and get something from each other. I think one of the nice things about Ashokan is that somebody who’s really great at one thing can be a beginner at something else. For me that concept came from a music and dance camp called "Camp Akiba" in Pennsylvania in 1978. This camp only happened once. There were about forty wonderful staffers, which included the New Lost City Ramblers and the Green Grass Cloggers, and every type of music in the folk tradition –– Irish and Scottish, what have you. There were only twelve participants attending. As a result, we all took each other’s classes, in order to fill the classes up, and it was great to see somebody who was an absolutely fantastic dancer be a beginning fiddler or an absolutely spectacular banjo player be a beginning dancer. It was really an eye opener, and everybody was equal in some way there. This was the inspiration for Ashokan. Most of the people who teach here are really specialists in a style, and I’m a little more of a, you know, I dabble in many styles. I haven’t zeroed in on one thing and stuck with it. That’s just my natural tendency. So I tend to be a little different, but I’ve enjoyed bringing together people who are more specialists here, to learn from, and I feel I’m learning from them. It’s a great environment. As I recall, you played in a band real early on called "Cat Mother and the All-Night Newsboys." Oh yeah. Let’s see, we formed the band in New York in the summer
of 1968. It was a rock band. We were basically starving, so at the end of
the summer I decided to go back and finish college. Later that year, they
got hooked up with a manager who also managed Jimi Hendrix, and Jimi produced
their first album. They released a single ("Good Old Rock and Roll"),
it hit #10 nationally and they were now touring with Hendrix, as his opening
act. I was in college watching this happen and was somewhat envious and
regretful. I graduated from college and came back to New York, upstate this
time, wondering what I was going do with my life. I got a call from some
of the band members. Someone was leaving and they wondered if I’d come
back into the band. I was completely astounded! So I joined the band again,
but then came the bad news. They were having real problems with management,
and they had signed all kinds of agreements that meant that they really
weren’t receiving any of the money they were earning. It got pretty
ugly and I firmly decided at that moment that big time music will always
have that whole side to it. There are a lot of people in and around it that
are only interested in money and business and are totally unconcerned with
the music, or musicians, or people. I mean there are wonderful trustworthy
people out there, in every type of music, but in big time music there’s
a lot more at stake and you can really get into trouble. I didn’t feel
comfortable playing that game or being in that arena, so after the second
album, Albion Doo-Wah, was finished, I bailed out, and went back
to acoustic music, fiddle music. That’s when we formed the Putnam String
County Band. Old Time Fiddle Traditions in New York StateBy Jim KimballIn old New York State playing the fiddle was usually associated with dancing; and most dancing, at least up to the rise of saxophones and trumpets in the Big Band Era in the 1930s, was accompanied by some kind of fiddle. In urban areas, formal resort centers, and for college socials the leader of the music was generally a well trained violinist conversant with all the latest ballroom fads. In the rural farm house or village dance it was often a self-taught fiddler. Their instruments were basically the same, though the city violinist probably paid more for his. The trained violinist could read difficult music, work his bow with complex and expressive movements and finger the instrument in high positions. The fiddler learned by ear or from much simpler music, kept his bowing short and rhythmic and usually stayed in first position. The violinist was careful to tuck his instrument under his chin and hold it with a nicely arched wrist. The rural fiddler might well hold it in a more relaxed manner and a bit lower. In fact for many a traditional fiddler it was important to keep his chin free so he could holler out or sing the calls to the square dances or reels which dominated old-time rural dancing. The one fiddler alone could easily be all the band and caller a rural house dance would need, though it could be long hard work. Old-time fiddler and Civil War veteran Edward Peterson, interviewed for the Livingston Republican in 1926, remembered that "in the early days he didn’t always have an orchestra, but played alone, standing up in the corner until five o’clock in the morning, when, as he laughingly said, ‘you could write your name on my coat for the dust.’" Peterson was one of several old-time New Yorkers known for singing rather than just hollering out most of his calls. Bristol fiddler and caller Hod Case noted in his diary an equally exhausting afternoon and night of playing for Fourth of July dancers: July the Fourth 1879 Hurrah. Looked like rain… Sam and I took breakfast at Harry Wards, drove to Woodruff’s Grove (south of Livonia Center) and I led the Richmond band’s orchestra for a Catholic festival and dance on the platform. Played ’til 7 o’clock p.m. Rec’d $5.00. We drove from there to Honeoye and I played to a fourth of July party at Stout’s Hall. John Briggs [banjo] and Benson [2nd fiddle] played with me… we played til morning. They danced one sett after daylight. I rec’d $5.00. The "sett" referred to here was a set of square dances, generally four or five figures (three is the norm today). Old-time New Yorkers called these "cotillions," "quadrilles" (often pronounced "kad-rils") or simply "setts." One of the earliest accounts we have of fiddling in western New York was related by Mrs. Anna Foster, remembering her youth in the Batavia area about 1805 (quoted in Turner’s Pioneer History of the Holland Land Purchase of Western New York, 1849): We used to have ox-sled rides, occasionally it would be out to Uncle Gid Dunham’s where we used to avail ourselves of the services of the left-handed fiddler, Russel Noble. Some of the earliest parties were got up by first designating the log house of some early settler, and each one contributing to the entertainment; one would carry some flour, another some sugar, another some eggs, another some butter, and so on; the aggregate making up a rustic feast. These parties would alternate from house to house. Frolics in the evening would uniformly attend husking bees, raisings, quiltings and pumpkin parings. All were social, friendly, obliging –– there was little of aristocracy in those primitive days. The ox-sled rides were soon replaced by horse-drawn sleighs or wagons and these in turn, by the 1920s, by automobiles; but the popularity of do-it-yourself house parties continued well into the twentieth century in rural New York. In 1990 Clarence Maher, then ninety-one years old, told about the old-time house dances along the Bovee Road east of Stone Church: Over there [in a house near Clarence’s farm] there’s a big hallway, three big rooms right in a line. We used to dance in all three… They’d charge 50 cents to pay the fiddlers and then they’d have a supper. Everybody’d bring cake or sandwiches. And they used to make their coffee in a great big ol’ copper boiler. They’d put it in a sugar bag, the coffee, and put it in. They’d put it on the stove about, oh, maybe half past ten, let her cook. Oh, we used to have great times…they don’t know the fun they used to have! And children were always welcome: Oh sure! …we’d park ’em –– we’d put ’em all to bed. One night we’s at a dance down here to Miller Menzie’s and we had twenty kids upstairs [asleep], and we was dancin’ all night. Many of those kids, including Clarence’s own, can still remember falling asleep to the sound of those fiddles at the old-time dances. The Old Time Tunes What kinds of tunes did they play? The pioneer generations in rural New York, up to the 1820s or so, danced mostly contra dances, longways dances with a line of gentlemen facing a line of ladies. There were dozens to choose from and many had their own special tunes. In the old English and New England tradition these tunes were generally in 6/8, 2/4 or 4/4 meter and built of symmetrical repeating phrases of four or eight bars of music (which translate into eight or sixteen-step dance figures, two steps to a bar). One common figure, for example, was "head couple down the center," in which the top couple joins hands and walks eight steps down the inside of the set and then eight back. Another was "right hands across" (today’s right and left star figure), where two gents and two ladies join right hands in the center and walk eight steps as in a turning star and then take left hands and return. A sequence of four such figures would add up to 32 bars of music, which is just the length of most of the old tunes (the ones often labeled "jigs and reels"). 19th century tune collections, both printed and in manuscript preserve hundreds, even thousands, of such tunes, many of which are still in common use. With the completion of the Erie Canal in the 1820s and an influx of new East coast urban influences across New York State, the old contra dances gradually gave way to a fad for the somewhat newer square dances (the cotillions or quadrilles) along with a succession of couple or "round" dances (e.g. waltzes, polkas, schottisches, and by the early 20th century, two steps and fox-trots). Locally, rural dancers tended to hang on to only a few of the contra standards, preferring instead the variability and spontaneity of sets of squares along with a handful of popular round dances. Favorite contra dances in one region or another of New York included "Opera Reel," "Money Musk," "French Four," "Crooked-S," "Lady Washington," "Portland Fancy," and "The Virginia Reel." The Opera Reel was particularly popular in some regions, as the Hod Case diaries note from an 1879 dance south of Caledonia: Feb 26 …Cold and blustering towards night… Albert carried me from Geo Haney’s to East Bloomfield, I took the train at 6:35 am and went to Caledonia, got breakfast. Zeke Adams came to Caledonia after me. I home with Zeke and slept til night. Zeke and I to John McDougal’s northwest of Zeke’s and played for a dance at night. I rec’d $5.00. They danced the Opera Reel about 2/3 of the time… Of all the contra dances once done in the state, however, the Virginia Reel (in New York usually danced to an old Scots tune, "The Fairy Dance") remained in use the longest and is the best remembered by today’s rural dancers. Some of the others survive as tunes still played by many old-time musicians in the state, but the dances themselves have been largely forgotten. It was the square dances, initially imported in rather formal guise from France and England, which in America developed the art of the dance caller, a leader who could audibly direct a room full of dancers. A good caller could (and still does) infuse a lot of fun and variety into an evening of dancing. And it was the country callers, often with fiddle in hand, who turned the square dance form, especially in rural areas, into the rollicking American folk art it was to become. Sets of quadrille tunes were composed and published in great numbers through the 19th century and some became widely popular. Others were more local in their origins and success and were more likely to be passed on by oral tradition than as written music. In either case individual tunes meant just to be part of a square dance set often lacked specific titles. Where these tunes were passed on to later generations they were often remembered simply as "an old square dance tune," "one of grandpa’s tunes," "quadrille," "Wagner’s First Change," or the like. Many of New York’s old-time musicians, especially those like Hilton Kelly, Vic Kibler, Mark Hamilton, Alice Clemens, the Wier Family Fiddlers and dulcimer player Paul Van Arsdale who grew up with older relatives or neighbors close to a rural square dance tradition, know a few tunes like these –– and there are some good ones. Because they have no distinctive titles, however, and since whatever old dances once went with them are now largely forgotten, these tunes are rarely played. They aren’t fancy enough for stage or contest performance and other musicians don’t know them, so they aren’t encouraged (or even thought of) in club or jam sessions. In New York State a great many of these old tunes are also in 6/8 time, a rhythm which backup musicians raised on commercial country or rock music sometimes find hard to play and therefore don’t (or they drive the fiddler crazy trying!). Popular songs played as dance tunes have been part of the tradition since at least the mid 19th century. Early minstrel show hits such as "Camptown Races," "Old Dan Tucker," "Buffalo Gals," "Climbing Up ’dem Golden Stairs," "Nelly Gray," and "Golden Slippers," all gained new success as square dance tunes. The use of these tunes would also encourage the development of singing calls. Where the caller was the fiddler, as was usually the case in rural New York, it was simply easier to sing the calls along with the tune than to be shouting out instructions against what you were playing. Other examples of older songs-turned-square-dances include "The Girl I Left Behind Me," "Life On The Ocean Wave" ("First Two Ladies Cross Over"), and "Marching Through Georgia." Since the 1930s, along with the development of microphones and P.A. systems, we have seen many newer country and pop tunes adapted for square dancing. "Alabama Jubilee," "My Little Girl," "Pistol Packin’ Mama," "Maöana," and "Walking The Floor Over You," for example, are all popular today as singing square dance tunes. A down side from the fiddler’s perspective, especially a fiddler who is not a caller, is that these easy song tunes can become rather boring to play. They can also be as easily played on electric guitar or accordion and the distinctive role of the old time fiddle is lost. A good fiddler can still make them exciting with improvisation and various shuffle or rocking bow techniques; but for many it just isn’t the same as playing one of those good old time fiddle tunes. A solution, and certainly not a new idea, was to get together with other musicians and play just for the fun of it, or to entertain non-dancers, or perhaps even to compete in a contest –– using the older jigs, reels and hornpipes to evoke memories of old-time dancing, complete with tapping toes, but no longer actually accompanying dancers. The Livonia Gazette records one such gathering in 1926: Last Saturday evening a musicale of pronounced merit was given at Dakin’s Candy Kitchen when Riley Ward fiddled… Walter Green jazzed the ivories, Alva Reed twanged his banjo and William Davison rattled the bones. The repertoire consisted of Old Zip Coon, High Level Hornpipe, Arkansas Traveller, Paddy on the Turnpike, Peeler’s Jacket, Pig Town Fling, Ostinelli’s Reel, Dar’s Sugar in the Gourd, Flower of Edinborough, College Hornpipe, Douglas’ Favorite and many other classics… (Livonia Gazette, Jan.15, 1926) The next year some of these same men helped start what became the single largest traditional music event in the region, the Old Fiddlers’ Picnic: OLD FIDDLERS HOLD PICNIC. Riley Ward conceived the idea that the old fiddlers ought to have a picnic, so he issued invitations for them to meet him at the Lakeville park last Monday. Old fiddlers and their wives, and many others assembled accordingly and had a gay time in the afternoon and evening. This was the first "annual." (Livonia Gazette, Aug.19, 1927) This picnic was held in a couple of different spots before settling for more than thirty years in the Hemlock fairgrounds. In time, however, the old fiddlers began to be outnumbered by more contemporary electric guitars and country singers. By the time the picnic was moved in the late ’60s to the Palmyra fairground it had lost, at least in the stage performances, most of its former emphasis on fiddling and old time tunes. The best fiddling was in the parking lot. Just as the Old Fiddlers’ Picnic was calling it quits, however, after fifty years, the Genesee Country Museum in Mumford started its own Fiddlers’ Fair, picking up much of the old time tradition that the Hemlock picnic had once presented. This event is now in its seventeenth year and many musicians, young and old, have played and shared their favorite tunes. Another highly successful fiddlers’ picnic has been that held every year since 1973 under the auspices of the New York State Old Tyme Fiddlers Association in Osceola, New York. In keeping with its stated mission to preserve, perpetuate and promote traditional fiddling, the association also operates a Fiddlers’ Hall of Fame and Museum. An Old-Time New York Repertoire As younger fiddlers are further and further removed from local New York folk traditions, the attraction to flashier, more commercial or simply more available tune repertoires and playing styles becomes very strong. Irish dance tunes, for example, can be wonderfully complex and beautifully minor in mood when compared to many of the old rural dance tunes. They are also easily heard on available recordings and at any of several regular sessions within urban Irish communities across the state. If not as widespread as the Irish influence, we can nevertheless see a similar attraction to several other immigrant or international fiddle traditions (e.g. Klezmer, Scandinavian, Scottish, etc.). The greater tendency for local players, however, is to turn to those North American styles which are emphasized in high profile contests, commercial country music or current folk fads (e.g. Southern Old-Time, Nashville, Bluegrass, Texas, Cajun, Anglo and French Canadian, Cape Breton, New England or Contemporary Contra Dance, etc.). We can find New York players who have excelled in all these styles and repertoires even though most did not grow up in these particular traditions. We could draw up a good list of tunes which have long been part of New York rural tradition, many of which are widely known and easily available in printed collections (a few of these have been noted above). We can also still find traces of distinct regional tune and dance repertoires (e.g. North Country, Catskills, Southern Tier, Western New York), though these are being weakened by the commercial trends and fads noted above. For these more local tunes, as well as for good examples of traditional New York playing styles and versions, you need to look up some of the old-timers. A short list of fine musicians who have recorded many tunes rooted in old New York tradition includes Alice Clemens, Vic Kibler, Don Woodcock, Mark Hamilton, Hilton Kelly, and dulcimer player Paul Van Arsdale. Hopefully, the continued presence of these and other old timers and their families, continued success of fiddlers’ picnics and rural square dances, and continued dedication of organizations such as the Old Tyme Fiddlers Association will guarantee survival of New York’s own fiddling traditions into generations to follow. For full versions of these articles, please visit Fiddler Magazine store to order back issues. |
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Jay Ungar, well known in the folk music community
through his fiddling with the David Bromberg Band, Fiddle Fever and Molly
Mason, has received international recognition for his composition, "Ashokan
Farewell," which served as the theme for the Grammy Award-winning soundtrack
of Ken Burns’ public television documentary, The Civil War. In addition
to frequent concert and radio appearances, Jay and Molly run several week-long
Fiddle and Dance workshops in the Catskills each summer. It was at one of
these ("Southern Week") that we held this interview, during a
break between teaching classes and playing for dances, and our conversation
often drifted back to the music camp that was in full swing outside the
trailer’s door.