 |
 |
 |
|
Winter 1999/2000ARTICLES
COLUMNS
TUNES
ARTICLE EXCERPTSCape Breton Virtuoso Jerry HollandBy Paul CranfordJerry Holland is one of the most influential fiddlers, composers and recording artists in the Celtic music scene today. Based in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, his early music was nurtured one-on-one in the Boston area by some of this century's greatest Cape Breton fiddlers. His tunes are often performed in sessions and concerts by fiddlers, pipers and bands around the world. Interviewer Paul Cranford is a longtime friend. In the late eighties Jerry and Paul collaborated to create Jerry Holland's Collection of Fiddle Tunes, a best-selling book now ready to go into its fourth printing. Jerry, I've known you for about twenty years now, and from the beginning you were a mature player. Could you summarize your musical development, up until the time we met? Maybe talk about early teachers, how your father helped you, or some of the different people early on. My father was a nice sweet player. He was an ear player. In his teachings I was to learn tunes note-for-note and phrase-for-phrase as I heard them from the players I learned them from, and I wasn't really to vary from that. Now, as time went on, I heard conflicting things between players playing the same tune, so I made choices as to which version I was going to learn. In some cases I learned both versions and played it in my own stylings, and used them as variations against each other. In my late teens and early twenties, when the John Allan Cameron Shows started, I had the opportunity to work with my hero, Winston Fitzgerald. Another fiddler that I knew played well who was on the pilot shows and a couple of the first shows was Angus Chisholm. Joe Cormier was another one who was on some of the pilot showsthen Wilfred Gillis and John Donald Cameron, and myself. Now I felt I had to play my best in front of these people, and I worked at it. I had to really buckle down and listen to what old tapes we had, or recordings, whether it be 78s or the LPs, in order to get the right kind of feel. I was a poor reader and still am to some extent today, although I can read and whistle a tune quicker than I can play it. It's just lack of practice on my part. But these fellows would help; where they either knew the tunes or had a version of the tunes to start with, they would teach them to me. John Donald Cameron was wonderful. Another person that was good at it was Winston. Wilfred would help at it when he could as well. So you were learning in a combination of ways from those fellows. You were learning from them one-on-one, you were going back with tapes, and going to the books when you couldn't remember. That's right. There was sheet music that would be provided for the shows. There would be anywhere from sixty to a hundred and twenty tunes. What would happen is that I'd leave from Boston and get into Montreal, and if I had the music beforehand I might have some idea, but I'd never get through the amount of tunes that they'd send. So being a quick learner and having a quick ear, I was able to get through the stuff, in some cases one tune at a time, or one grouping of tunes at a time. I could learn a grouping of tunes in say fifteen minutes. Even tunes I had never heard before, because the pressure was on and these people were gracious enough to take the time with me and play the stuff until I had an earful of it and could reproduce it for them. So it was an incredible pressure, to have to learn so many tunes and play them like I'd always played them, like they were part of my repertoire. It was an unnecessary kind of task that they performed for me, and I'm very grateful for it. I think very highly of them for the time they took with me. You'd be learning sixty to a hundred and twenty tunes every show? No, no, for the group of shows that we'd be doing. There might be four or five shows a week, and it would be one week every five or six weeks. It would be a twenty-six week series, or a thirteen week series. In some cases they showed reruns, which gave us a breathing space of three months or better. There'd be pilot shows for another series of shows that they'd want to do and so on. Since you did this for three years, it sounds like you had the best teachers possible for perhaps as many as a thousand tunes. Yeah, I would say a minimum of a thousand tunes. Let's backtrack a little. How old were you when you first started playing sets in public? Maybe nine, ten years old, something like that, at Bill Lamey's dances. It was Bill's dances that kept the interest there. He had me play one set per night for the most part. A couple of years later I started playing some fiddle at Tom Slavin's place where Angus Chisholm played, and another fellow by the name of Bert Foley. Bert and Angus were the paid fiddlers and I was the guitar player for them. Somebody would give me a break and I'd end up playing the fiddle, too, for a short little stint. Would the repertoire be something your father taught you, or were you starting to pick them up off the tapes by then? I was picking them up off the tapes, and from my father, and what I'd hear at the dances from Angus and Bill and Bert Foley, and so on. It sounds like you had really good early training in music being around inspiring players. Oh, of course. I was exposed to people like Cameron Chisholm during that period, who would come up and play for dances at Tom Slavin's, or at John Campbell's dances or whatever. And Theresa MacLellan, and Big Donald MacLellan. I guess it was probably around the time that you started playing for dances that you started getting some other lessons as well? I was about thirteen, fourteen years old when I started taking the actual violin lessons in order to learn to read music and learn some technique, and so on. And learn how many bad habits I had! They were unbreakable in some cases, and some I was able to break. I learned the very basics of position work and that sort of thing. A lot of it didn't stay with me, but some of the very basics did. I learned to read music poorly; I guess I would bluff my way through some of that stuff. The piece of music I was to learn I would learn by ear before I left the lesson and somewhat keep it in mind until the next week so I could get it off my mind and move onto the next thing I had to learn, instead of using the method of actually reading the music. I cheated myself. It was one of those periods of time in, I guess, a guy's life, when everything else in the world was more important. If you were to advise a young fiddler coming up about how to go about learning, are you saying that they should go the classical route first, or that they should learn by ear first, or do them both together? Well I'd first look to see that they had an ear that would let them reproduce something that you'd either whistle to them or sing to them or play to them. Or get them to sing a song as simple as Happy Birthday to see if they could hold the proper pitch to it over the duration of the song, as well as the actual air of the song. If you haven't got an ear for it, you're not going to go anywhere. And you've got to be able to hold a rhythm and be able to execute that as well I would look to see that a young person would learn the proper techniques of holding the instrument and caring for the instrument, and learn to read as efficiently as possible, say before the age of thirteen or something like that. Because there is that period between say thirteen and fifteen when that age group has a change that takes time to work out of and mature. If it was somebody that was really interested after that period of time, I would still look to see that they had an ear and went the same route. I would see that the teacher understood what type of music they were looking to learn and play, and see that the teacher worked with them on that, versus the classical music, because it does make an extreme difference. They can work on technique and embellishments that are used in Celtic forms of music, and, depending on how far they wanted to go with it, maybe not have to go to some of the lengths the classical players would have to go to to achieve greatness in that field. I know Winston Fitzgerald often said that he wished he'd gone the classical route and learned his instrument in that approach. And yet for most people, they think of Winston as a great fiddler and we wouldn't want to see him any other way. Why do you think it is that sometimes great fiddle players still look at classical musicians with awe? Possibly because of the discipline that they have in being able to be consistent. The classical player has it all over folks like us in a lot of ways, where in some cases, it's hit or miss. Maybe I should only speak of myself in that way. I'll gamble in some cases, whether it's a technique that I either haven't got down well enough or some form of a variation from the norm, I'll take a chance and sometimes it works. But in not being consistent, you can accidentally come up with variations and embellishments. It's often part of what makes a good fiddle player. That's true enough. I guess without accidents and mistakes, there wouldn't be a development of sorts. Some learn from their mistakes and some can create from their mistakes. But getting back to what you were saying originally, I think if you have some of the basic rudiments of classical training, you can choose to work from that where you get a cleaner, better tone from your instrument. You're not handicapped in the way that you hold your instrument, for instance. I don't believe there's any advantage to the way I hold either instrument the bow or the fiddle. Some theorize that where I hold the bow acts as a counter balance. I don't know if that theory holds water or not. I hear other fiddlers doing the same things I do, and they hold the bow in the classical manner. And I hear other fiddlers that hold the bow properly doing things that I'd like to be able to do, but can't because of the way I hold the bow. I guess each tradition has an accent and style, and what you're saying is that the techniques are not what give you that accent and style. They're totally separate things. Yeah. I think that you can learn a lot of the traditional stylings using a classical postureyou don't have to hold it the way I do in order to play like I do. You can hold it in the fashion that a classical violinist would and achieve all of what I achieve. [See Jerry's website at www.capebretonet.com/Music/Holland/] [Lighthousekeeper Paul Cranford has published many books of fiddle music, including the four-volume Cape Breton Musical Heritage Series -- the first of which was Jerry Holland's Collection of Fiddle Tunes. Also a fiddler and composer in the Cape Breton and Irish traditions, many of his tunes are widely played. See his website, which includes a "Tune of the Month," at www.cranfordpub.com]
Liz Carroll: America 's Irish Fiddler ExtraordinaireBy Donna MaurerLiz Carroll is internationally recognized as one of the finest American composers and fiddlers in the Irish tradition. As a teen, she won both the Junior and the Senior All-Ireland Fiddle Championships. In 1994, Liz was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, presented by first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, for her immense contribution to the Irish musical tradition in America. Liz was also selected as one of the top 100 Irish Americans of 1995 by Irish America magazine. Liz will have a long-awaited new release coming out early next year on the Green Linnet label. I first heard Liz Carroll's playing on a collection of Celtic fiddle music put out by Green Linnet called Playing With Fire; since then, I've listened to her playing on other recordings, both as soloist with some backing, and as a band member with Trian. I met Liz Carroll this August at the first annual Rocky Mountain Fiddle Camp, held at Camp Shady Brook near Deckers, Colorado. Liz was an instructor and performer at the camp; she was also a session player and camper along with her two children. I attended many of Liz' classes while at the camp, and found her to be quite accessible, with her warm and witty personality, as well as easy to learn from and extremely knowledgeable about Irish fiddle playing. With so much going on at the camp, Liz and I decided to wait until later to chat about her fiddle-playing. The following is an excerpt of that conversation. When did you start playing the fiddle? I started the fiddle when I was nine, at the South Side of Chicago. There was a school there that had a nun that taught violin and piano. She taught both instruments, which was pretty rare for South Side Catholic schools. I was going to be playing the piano. We bought a piano, but we couldn't get it in the house. It was the days of upright pianos. So my Mom said, "C'mon, do this, try this, because Grandpa plays the fiddle, and you could play it with him, and you could bring it with you places." That's how I ended up with the fiddle, and I loved it. I had thought I'd hate it, and I was refusing to do it until then I think I was lucky [to play fiddle, and now] I'm really glad. When I put my hands on a piano since then, I can just see it would have been a disaster! How did you come to start liking the fiddle? Oh, I liked it the first minute I had it in the house. I was already playing the accordion at home, and my parents had bought me a tin whistle, too. So I was already able to play tunes Actually, when we started off, we got sticks to begin with, so you didn't get the violin itself. The one stick was just to bow with, and the other one had all the fingering. You'd turn the stick around and practice putting your fingers in the spots. That's what we got first, and I think it was a good three weeks before I got an actual violin in the house; then I thought that it was the greatest. It's like my son with a basketball: he loves it, loves the feel of it, loves everything about it. That's the way I've felt about the fiddle right from the start. I was already playing another instrument, and I was able to pick up stuff by ear. I didn't get that fiddle until I had the notion about what to do with it. I think I started trying to figure out my tunes as soon as I got it home. I had definite lessons that started off with open strings, and I was trying to find my tunes that I knew right off the bat. I think anybody does that pretty much. It's pretty hard to keep anybody from wanting to surge ahead. How long had you been playing tin whistle and accordion? I don't know; I think since I was six. I started off with a little play accordion, and then I went on to my Dad's accordion. For Christmas or for whatever holiday [was coming up], I was interested in some little shiny trumpet in the store, or a keyboard or something. I've always liked instruments. It sounds like you're from a musical family. Yes. Mom's father played the fiddle, and she really loved the music. She didn't play herself, but she's able to lilt. My Dad plays the accordion. I think his father played a bit, and his grandmother played a little bit of concertina. My brother Tom played trombone and very scratchy fiddle for awhile, but he didn't stick with it. He was very happy the day that he sat on his fiddle and cracked it, to which he said, "yeah!" We were all saying, "Wow, it was that easy!" It's kind of funny My mom's father played the fiddle, but my mom's mother used to do a bit of theater. She was a farmer, actually a farmer's wife; she used to do a bit of theater, and she was good at speaking. Well, I feel like my brother Tom and I are "split." He does acting here in Chicago, and he's able to memorize words left and right, [whereas] I have a horrible time remembering words. He always had a very difficult time remembering music... he'd have to read it, [whereas] I never had a hard time with the music. Could you describe what you're doing when you play and write Irish traditional music? How do you keep it traditional, yet make it your own? I've always done it; I've always made up tunes, it seems. I have a slip of paper here my brother wrote on it, "Liz' Masterpiece." It was the first tune that I actually wrote down, but I was always playing around with bits and pieces of tunes. I started the fiddle when I was nine, and I know I wrote a tune for the fiddle when I was nine. So I've always been doing it. I don't know how it comes out Irish; it's very interesting, isn't it? My mind just goes that way, that it tends to settle in and be an Irish tune. Perhaps it's because you've been surrounded by Irish music all your life. Another question: when you're writing a tune, how do you know that it's not one you've heard a long time ago? Yes, I know lots of people [that I would ask], "Have you ever made up a tune?" And they [would] say, "No, because every time I do it, it sounds like something else." I usually don't think it sounds like anything else. Sometimes the tunes come to you, sometimes you actually sit down and work at it, and just say, "I want to work on something new." If I'm writing a tune, I usually don't find that I'm thinking that a phrase sounds like this tune or that. I've never scratched off anything and just said, "no, that's this [other] tune." It really hasn't happened. But if I play the tune for somebody, they'll say, "Oh, that first phrase? It sounded just like this [other tune], and this [phrase] sounded just like that [other tune]." Luckily, it doesn't sound like that to me, so that I can carry on and not get discouraged and say, "Oh, forget it - every other tune goes this way!" I go to great lengths not to ever do that to anybody when they play their tune for me. I think all of us will hear little bits and pieces of other tunes, but then after a point, after you've heard it enough times, it becomes its own tune. So you can take bits and pieces here and there, but as a whole, if it's logical in any way, it's going to hold together as its own piece. Besides your family, are there other influences in your fiddle playing? Anybody in particular? Well, here in Chicago, [there was] Johnny McGreevy. He was the best fiddle player here, but there were many other nice fiddle players that had different qualities that I liked, too. Sometimes just the look of them; you'd practice swaying like somebody if you rather liked the look of it! We had fiddlers from different counties. Johnny McGreevy was mostly a Sligo-influenced fiddle player. Would you say that your own style is more of a Sligo style? Well, even though I knew Johnny was the best player, I wasn't that drawn to playing like him. Mainly it was because Johnny used to leave all the rosin sitting on his fiddle, and there was a point in time there where it was a pretty rough and squeaky-sounding fiddle. I liked it to sound very clean and pretty, and it would tend to sound rough with Johnny. My Mom showed him about cleaning off his strings finally at some point, and he got new strings and got the bow rehaired. I think along the way, he even got a [new] bow; I remember Brendan Mulvihill gave him a bow one time. As a result, he sounded a lot better! We also used to listen to recordings [of]Sean McGuire, who was incredible. Here was a really clean-sounding player. We used to hear him a lot, too, at my dancing class. They used to play him doing set dances, and a lot of times the reels and [other] stuff, too. He was just so clean and forceful, with a whole lot of umph! You could feel the beat, and you could feel him really driving the bow in reels. Sometimes he'd lay back and do a little hopping of the bow; nobody [else] did that, and I don't think I liked that either. But definitely, when he really just played a reel and just laid that bow down I think I probably still move my bow with a bit of force just from him. We had people coming through town as well. When Sean McGuire came through town, his piano player at that time, and his girlfriend, was Josephine Keegan. She was a fiddle player, too, and she played one set of tunes on her own. This would have been back around 1968 or somewhere around there. And wow! She was a beautiful player, and she was a girl. So I thought, "That's really terrific!" And when the Comhaltas [Ceoltoiri Eireann] tours were coming out here, we would hear fiddle players like Seamus Connolly and Paddy Glackin, really great players Sean Ryan also came out here when I was young, and I really thought he was a beautiful player - a gorgeous fiddle player from Offaly. He came out here, too; I think that would have been around 1968 or so as well. [He was another] clean, beautiful player who composed a lot of tunes. I remember the night that he played; there were a lot of gorgeous tunes that we knew, that were his. He played very much at the tip of the bow. I played at the tip of the bow for a long time after I saw him play, because [his playing] sounded so good. I was like, "God! There's gotta be something to playing up there!" So I stayed up around the tip of the bow for a long time. I was telling that story to somebody recently, and they said they remembered, and I think it was Brendan Mulvihill, too, that said, "Oh, she plays so much at the tip of the bow, it's like Sean Ryan." I didn't realize it was really that obvious. I did that for a good while. So why did you stop doing that? I'm sure I just started having fun, or having more fun and not caring! When you were learning and studying, you were more serious about getting the techniques. Now has it become second nature? I have a tendency to get lazy and not practice, per se. Instead, I'd go out and play, but not actually practice. So every once in a while, I'd start beating myself up about it, and then start announcing to everybody that I'm going to start working at this, and try to motivate myself. And then I would do it. So I work for different periods of time; I just don't keep it up for some reason. [I spend] long nights at sessions, but not so much sitting here in the house by myself. Even when I was a kid, I hated to practice in a room by myself, maybe because the house is empty or whatever. I'm far happier if there's somebody to play off of, or somebody to talk to, while I'm working on something. I always used to play in the kitchen at home, and people would be walking by, and I somehow liked the company in it. [Donna Maurer currently plays traditional Irish fiddle with her band
Inisheer and in sessions in Colorado Springs. She also plays other styles
and instruments, including rock on an electric 5-string violin.]
Cliff Bruner: Swingin' from the Golden Triangle to HoustonBy Paul Anastasio"We didn't know what we were doin'. We were just kids." I had to smile when I heard Cliff Bruner dismiss his early recordings this way. He was reminiscing as we visited last year in California, where he was soon to be inducted into the Sacramento Western Swing Society's Hall of Fame. I had dropped everything and flown south last October upon hearing that Cliff was planning to attend the Sacramento western swing get-together. You see, I had been studying Cliff's pioneering fiddle work for over a year, poring over CD sets of his work with Milton Brown's band and with his own group, the Texas Wanderers. I'd had a chance to jam with Cliff late one night after the Athens, Texas, fiddle contest way back in the early '80s, but hadn't seen him since, and I couldn't pass up another opportunity to see one of my all-time favorite western swing fiddlers. Cliff had originally been scheduled to teach in 1998 at the Augusta Heritage Center's Swing Week in Elkins, West Virginia, but had to cancel as his wife hadn't been feeling well. I was tapped to replace him, and because several students had already signed up expecting to study under Cliff, I decided to use his solos as part of the course material. As I dug into the tunes I felt as though I'd really struck gold, musically speaking. From the very beginning of his career, Cliff has always demonstrated tremendous imagination, and it was easy to find enough study material for a week's worth of classes. Heck, there were enough good ideas on his records to fill several years' worth of classes! At any rate, we used "Cliff's notes" for a good part of our week of swing fiddle study, and on the last day placed a phone call to Houston to give each of the students a chance to talk to Cliff. I guess at this point a little history might be in order. For much of this information and some of Cliff's quotes I'm greatly indebted to Kevin Coffey, who wrote the voluminous notes that accompany the Bear Family's boxed set of five Cliff Bruner CDs. I understand that Kevin has been putting a lot of time into documenting the history of western swing and interviewing many of the surviving players. My hat's off to you, Kevin. I hope that we have the chance to meet soon! Clifton Lafayette Bruner was born on April 25th, 1915, in Texas City, Texas. By the age of four he had started playing fiddle, in his own words, "before I could even talk good." Before long his family moved to Tomball, north of Houston, and he "started playing the old country dances that we used to have, with the corn meal on the floor. I never did like to pick cotton or raise watermelon and found out I could make more money playing my fiddle than I could doing that. So my heart just got set on music and there was nothing I could do about anything else. I wanted to play music. It was just imbedded into me." He can cite no violin players who were major formative influences as he was growing up, and he developed his unique sound in relative isolation. This is in contrast to the jazz violin world, where in most cases we can "follow the trail," as it were, tracing the influence of the early players on those who came later. For example, Joe Venuti drew part of his style from the early work of Eddie South, who first recorded way back in 1923. Similarly, Stuff Smith, Svend Asmussen and Stéphane Grappelli all cited Venuti as an early influence. However, although we hardly need a bloodhound to sniff out Cliff's influence on Johnny Gimble, J.R. Chatwell, Clyde Brewer and many other western swing fiddlers, he seems to have built his style on his own. So isolated was Cliff from the musical mainstream that when he was tapped in 1935 to join the hottest western swing band going, Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies, he was really only vaguely aware of who they were. He says, "I didn't even really know who he [Milton] was! I was so deep into just playing that fiddle and earning a living, traveling around. I didn't have time to listen to the radio didn't have a radio anyway. I was working toward the same thing, but I had never heard the Brownies." He was going to turn the job with Milton down, saying later, "We had just got that band going in Houston and I didn't want to bust it up. I told the boys that I wasn't gonna take the job. I wasn't going to let them down. But 'Rip' Ramsey [his bassist at the time] says to me, 'Oh no you're not, Cliff. Do you know who Milton Brown is? He's got the top band in the world! No, you're going to take that job. I'm going to take you up there myself.' And he did." Bruner's hot, unpredictable style was perfect for the Musical Brownies. He was paired with another terrific fiddler, the classically trained, heavily Joe Venuti-influenced Cecil Brower. The two cut over four dozen sizzling sides with Milton Brown's great band, which included the legendary steel guitarist Bob Dunn and the piano-poundin', cigar-chompin' Fred "Papa" Calhoun (with whom this author had the distinct pleasure of recording in the early 1980s). We are fortunate indeed that these recordings, and in fact Milton Brown's complete recorded output, are now available on a five-CD set, courtesy of Texas Rose Records. Cliff has the highest praise for Brown, saying, "He was the greatest bandleader who ever lived and will ever live. I'm 80 years old [now 84] and if he was still living, I'd still be working for him." Sadly, Milton died in 1936 from pneumonia that developed while he was hospitalized following an automobile accident. He was only 32. Following his death, his brother Derwood Brown took over the band, but Cliff soon left, feeling that the magic had been lost. If he was to showcase his phenomenal fiddling, it would have to be in a band of his own. February of 1937 found Cliff in a studio set up in the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio, accompanied by his bandmate from the Musical Brownies, "Papa" Calhoun, and Leo Raley, one of the first players (if not the first) of a new instrument, the electric mandolin. The seven-piece, drummer-less band cut seventeen sides in one day. The tunes waxed included "Old Fashioned Love," "Corrine, Corrina," Kokomo Arnold's "Milk Cow Blues," and Clarence Williams' novelty numbers "The Right Key (But the Wrong Keyhole)" and "I Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None o' this Jelly Roll." In my recent phone conversation with Cliff, he told me a little about the mechanics of those old recording sessions. When folks back in those days referred to a band "waxing" sides, this was literally true. The old master recordings were in fact cut into large wax discs. Cliff told me that each of these yellow beeswax discs weighed around 20 or 25 pounds, and that hundreds of pounds of wax had to be unloaded from a truck and carted into the recording studio in order to have sufficient master discs for one of the mammoth recording sessions popular in those days. The seventeen sides waxed that day in February of '37 necessitated the use of close to 400 pounds of wax! Cliff also told me that if a wax master was ruined during or after the recording process it had to be shipped to New York, where it would be trimmed down so that it could be used again. Another story that Cliff brought to life for me during our conversation was the saga of songwriter Floyd Tillman's attempts to get a recording made of his song "It Makes No Difference Now." Floyd had been performing the song with the Blue Ridge Playboys at dances and on the radio and it had proven to be quite popular. However, he was having a devil of a time getting it recorded. The Vocalion label had turned the song down flat. It was too slow and too sad, in their opinion. Cliff said that in those depression days the record companies didn't want to touch slow numbers. This certainly was the case with Decca Records, Cliff's label at the time. The fact is borne out by a 1938 letter to Cliff from Decca's Dave Kapp discussing the details of an upcoming recording session. In it, Dave tells Cliff in no uncertain terms that, "We want to tell you in advance that we want nothing but hot numbers" Bruner had heard Floyd's song, and was convinced that it would be a hit. He told me, "I told Dave, 'Listen to me. This song is gonna be a big hit. I don't care if it is slow.' He listened. We cut the song, and they put it on a plane and sent it to New York. They had all of their presses going day and night pressing that song, for fifteen days." Cliff said that even with that large an initial pressing that the demand for the record was so great that copies were being sold for $5.00, an astounding sum when you consider that records were selling in those days for around 50 cents. The song was soon recorded by Jimmie Davis, who in later years became the governor of Louisiana, and its success helped Floyd Tillman get his own recording contract. A standout musician from the old Musical Brownies lineup who soon came on board the Bruner juggernaut, waxing dozens of sides with Bruner's bands, was the inimitable, utterly idiosyncratic steel guitar pioneer Bob Dunn. Dunn had been Cliff's seatmate in the Milton Brown band, traveling thousands of miles back in those days before modern interstate highways. Years before going to work for Brown, Dunn had seen a black guitarist on Coney Island using a homemade pickup and amplifier, and was sufficiently fascinated to follow the man to New Orleans to learn more about his odd contraption. In Cliff's words, Bob "had a great big old guitar that he bought down in Mexico. He had a nut under the strings to raise them up. He had a homemade pick-up on there. He had to magnetize the strings with a magnet that came out of the coils of a Model T Ford. He had to keep his strings magnetized. Before he went to work he had to magnetize everything, at least once a night. It would get a little weak some, he'd run that magnet across there." In the early days with Milton Brown, people hearing this new sound on the radio would have no idea what it was. Some thought the sounds they were hearing emanated from a trombone, others suspected a saxophone. At any rate it was new and different, and HOT! Dunn is featured prominently on Cliff's 1938, '39 and '40 sessions. 1938 also saw the beginning of what was to be almost a ten-year musical association between Bruner and a certified wild man on piano and vocals, Aubrey "Moon" Mullican. "Moon" (Cliff recalls referring to him as "moonshine"you can draw your own conclusions) was quoted as saying, "You got to make those bottles bounce on the table," and bounce they did when he played. Other players came and went throughout the years of recording sessions, but Mullican remained a constant 'way up till 1947. One other player who passed through Bruner's band on his way to greater fame was at the time just a kid. Cliff says of J.R. Chatwell that, "I got him out of the cotton fields." He told me that when he first met J.R., the young man was picking cotton "way out in the breaks" of east Texas. Cliff used J.R. on a fine 1939 session, and says of Chatwell that, "He started out playing like me, but then he developed his own style." Did he ever! Known to his friends as "Chat the Cat," J.R. grew to become one of the most original of all western swing fiddlers. His Svend Asmussen-influenced self-igniting fiddle style can be heard on many of the recordings of Adolf Hofner and his Texans, as well as on one cut on the currently available CD Wanderers SwingTexas Dance Hall Music (Krazy Kat KK CD 11) from England. Johnny Gimble, who lists J.R. along with Cliff as a major influence on his playing, told me that it wasn't until years after hearing J.R. that he heard Svend, and his initial thought was, "Ol' Svend sure sounds a lot like J.R.! I wonder how he heard him." Of course, it was the other way around. This author was extremely lucky to have had several opportunities to play with J.R., although "Chat the Cat" was not playing fiddle at the time, as a stroke in 1968 had limited him to vocalizing and playing piano. What a cat! These were unforgettable jam sessions! Of the many other fine musicians who passed through Cliff Bruner's bands through the years, one standout was Lincoln "Link" Davis, a Louisiana Cajun who was a triple-threat on fiddle, saxophone and vocals. Years later, his son, "Link" Davis, Jr., was to add spice to the sound of latter-day western swingsters Asleep at the Wheel. [Paul Anastasio has played swing, western swing, country and many other fiddle styles for close to forty years. A former student of Joe Venuti, his is a veteran of the bands of Merle Haggard, Asleep at the Wheel, Larry Gatlin and Loretta Lynn. He is currently a student of Mexican violinist Juan Reynoso and is transcribing the fiery music of Tierra Caliente.] For full versions of these articles, please visit Fiddler Magazine store to order back issues. |
|||||||||
