A Sweet Fiddle Tune

Next project

With the master's thesis behind me, I'm moving on to the next project: Moving. We closed on the new house Friday and will be making the big haul across town tomorrow. 

Here are a few shots of the upstairs as it looked earlier this year: First February and then March and early April. That's my brother-in-law Chris in the gas mask. Our contractors, John Duesler (walls and trim) and Steve Maxson (electrical) and Jeff Shaver (floors), did great and fast work. Stay tuned for current photos of the new, improved 7 Prindle Ave.  

Mission accomplished

After about a year (on and off, mostly on) of intense intellectual and creative labor, I submitted my master's thesis on Monday. Three days later, it still hasn't sunk in that I'm done. Maybe that's because I'm still working full-time as a newspaper editor as well as teaching journalism two nights a week ... perhaps I need a full weekend to unwind.

One of the first things I did after turning in the manuscript (88 pages, but who's counting?) was to go to the library and return a crate full of books I had been using for my research and inspiration. Of course I couldn't leave the library empty-handed, so I grabbed a small stack of new books. It's great to be able to read purely for pleasure again. I suspect, however, that my idea of "pleasure reading" has evolved a bit over the last three years. I picked up books of essays by Andrei Codrescu, poems by Gerald Stern, illustrated fiction by Charles Bukowski with R. Crumb, and a novel by Johnathan Lethem. I selected them based on how little they resembled the material I was reading for the thesis ...

Folks are always asking what my thesis was about, and I'm tired of trying to explain it in 50 words or fewer, so here is an excerpt from the abstract that sums it up as briefly as possible:

In her essay "On Place in Fiction," the Southern writer and photographer Eudora Welty wrote, "It is both natural and sensible that the place where we have our roots should become the setting, the first and primary proving ground, of our fiction. Location, however, is not simply to be used by the writer – it is to be discovered … Discovery does not imply that the place is new, only that we are."

 

Knowing Home: Short Fiction from Fulton County, N.Y. is a collection of five short stories set in the writer's home region, which straddles the Mohawk Valley and Adirondack Foothills of New York State. The collection isintroduced with a critical essay that combines personal narrative and scholarship about the ways location interacts with culture, economics and identity, and how these interactions apply to the writer's own fiction and modern American realistic fiction in general.

The essay also briefly investigates how these interactions are eminent in "Mohawk," the first published novel by Richard Russo. The novel's setting is a nominally fictionalized town resembling Gloversville, N.Y., which was Russo's "first and primary proving ground" and is immediately adjacent to this writer's hometown, Johnstown.

So Long, Mr. Vonnegut

How's this for a strange coincidence: Tonight I returned to the Johnstown Public Library an audio collection of short fiction by Kurt Vonnegut. Some of the stories were classics that I had read before, inlcuding "Harrison Bergeron" and "Welcome to the Monkey House." But many of the others were new to me, such as "A Deer in the Works," and I enjoyed them immensely as I listened to them in the car over the course of the last two weeks. When I got home from the library, I surfed the news sites on the Web to learn that Vonnegut died today. Hmmm ...

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=580066

Tags: Vonnegut, Literature

Grand opening

I will be playing informally and quite unplugged for the grand opening of my brother-in-law's new business. Here are the details: 

Touch Therapies of Saratoga, 8 Butler Place, will host a grand opening reception to introduce its staff and services to the community.

 

The public is welcome to attend the grand opening, which will take place from 4:30 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 12. Free chair massages will be offered, and the event will feature live acoustic music, refreshments and information about the aromatherapy products available from Victoria's Essentials.

 

Touch Therapies' practitioners offer techniques ranging from Swedish-style relaxation massage to Shiatsu and Reiki as well as hot-stone massage. Custom massage therapy is available for clients who prefer a personalized approach.

For more information about Touch Therapies of Saratoga, call (518) 580-8501 or visit www.ttofsaratoga.com.

Thoughts on "Folk" Music

I received this dispatch from my friend Roland Vinyard today. I keep telling him that he should start blogging, but he prefers to send his commentaries around via e-mail. He makes some useful observations here on the way we label various kinds of American "roots" music: 

 

 

Shifting  Definitions, a Rambling Discourse

With an educational background in history, I have often been amused* by how the definitions of words change over time. I first considered words like “conservative”, “liberal”, “radical” and “moderate”. When I was in college in the roaring '60s, the views of someone we called moderate back then would be called liberal today. And a person who calls himself an arch-conservative today would have been branded “radical” back then had he espoused the same ideas. Remember: the word “radical” does not really have either  a left or a right connotation; it means far out. Rightly call an ultraconservative a radical today and watch the shock and disbelief cross his face.

 

And there have been changes in the music community as well. A product of the Hootenanny era, I called myself a “folksinger” back then. I still do, but am hesitant to use the word anymore as so many people today think “folk music” is the stuff that singer-songwriters do. But, it isn’t. Folk music, as traditionally defined, has 2 important characteristics: the authorship is unknown, and it has been learned by oral transmission. Over the centuries, it was a given that both the melody and words of songs were in a slow but constant state of flux, depending upon just who it was that was singing them. It was a little like the old game of Postman, Telephone, or whatever it was called, where someone whispers a phrase into his neighbor’s ear, who does the same thing in turn to his neighbor, and by the time the circle is completed, it has taken on meanings never originally intended. But still, that usage worked pretty well for centuries. Many songs originated as popular ones, printed on what were termed “broadsides”, but since so few common folks could read or afford to buy them, they unintentionally inflicted subtle changes upon them. Many broadsides did not have the author’s name on them, even when It might have been known at the time. Every traditional song we sing today was made up by someone at some time, then slowly altered as others began to sing it. This still happens, though I think to a lesser degree.

Then radio and recordings were invented and things began to change at a faster pace. People began to learn their music by listening to exactly the same version that everyone else did. Can this still be called learning orally? The case could be made either way. At any rate, things seem to have become standardized in the process. Don’t believe this? Try singing the original words to “Tom Dooley” and listen to the crowd ignore you and sing the Kingston Trio version. Ever have someone stop you when singing something that “wasn’t right”? If it was a  truly traditional song,, who’s to say?  Here is another example, the beloved hymnal, Rise Up Singing.  We all  know that in many cases extra verses have been added, some traditional ones deleted here and there and a whole lot of politically correct laundering was exercised. But will our children know this? And their children?  Check out the book sometime as see just how many of its songs are actually traditional ones. It is a surprisingly small proportion that are. But there is no one “right” way to sing traditional music. There can be, however, wrong ways, ways not in keeping with our own musical traditions.

So what do  singer-songwriters do if it is not folk music? Good question. You can answer it, not me. Pop music? Acoustic music? Acoustic pop? Traditional sounding? (what a mouthful - that’ll never catch on) Give me a better name. Confusing the issue and blurring the boundaries are the times when someone, not you, knows the author or on the other side are times when you have learned it from a recording of an original source, meaning a traditional singer who got  it orally  from his family or friends.

Let’s take another musical word - “old-timey”. That is actually a fairly new word, and its closest precursor is “hillbilly”, which we rarely hear used today. But the two are not the same - otherwise there would have been no need to coin “old-timey”. Hillbilly music was generally recorded, early country music, that frequently drew upon its folk roots for inspiration and even for its material. Old timey shares that, and is a mixture of old time fiddle tunes, parlor songs, humorous things, ballads (from what were then current on to extremely old ones form previous centuries) and so on. It was mostly vocal music, but frequently relied heavily upon instrumental breaks for variety and occasionally  a completely instrumental piece (fiddle tune, ragtime, “piece”, march...) was worked in the mix. The New Lost City Ramblers come to my mind as a quintessential old-timey group. Today, people argue with me about what old-timey is. They mean just fiddle tunes, which is just one part of the original form. As practiced today, old timey means lots of fiddlers (if possible- you never get too many),  who have the melody  all the time, every time, and they will saw away on it for 5, 10, 15 minutes before going to the next tune, which will be in the same key, just about  always in duple meter. They never get bored with this, which I fail to understand. But once in a while, they will break the pattern and permit something slower to be played or a verse to be sung. Incidentally, many of our traditional fiddle tunes actually do have verses, though they are largely forgotten today. I have watched some fiddlers refuse to play on these aberrant pieces and have seen them sit resignedly quiet until it is finally over and they can get back to business as usual. This has limited appeal to me, but, hey, different strokes....

Here’s a third word - “blues”, and it is not a very old term either, being coined roughly about the time the recording industry was founded. If you think about it much, you will come to the realization that most blues pieces are not really folk music, at least not by the traditional definition (hey, didn’t I have pun with that one!). The majority of these songs have readily identifiable composers and we usually learn them from recordings. The old blues singers, such as Robert Johnson, Charley Patton. Son House,  the various Blinds  (Blake, Lemon, Fuller, Willie McTell...) were really singer-songwriters who wrote in the blues idiom, and not always in 12 bars either, though they might frequent that many in a good night (I just snuck another one in!). These guys were trying to earn a living and would sing whatever brought in the bucks. It is known that Johnson and Blake, for instance, did cakewalks, ragtime, dance music, “pieces”, whatever the crowd wanted. The recording executives of the old race records figured that blues was what sold, so that’s what they had them record - the rest has been lost. Blues were certainly what made their music distinctive  and struck straight to the soul of the listener. The singers were in no position to argue with the guy paying them - they want to hear blues, we like to sing blues too, so we’ll do it for them, no problema. The bluesmen were under some pressure to find new material and record execs were well aware of copyright law. It was a mixture that produced several generations of the black acoustic singer-songwriters that we call bluesmen and it continues forward today as the electrified Rhythm & Blues.

The tree of folk music, your definition or mine, has deep roots and has developed many intertwined branches, all of which need nurturing. There is no one “correct” way to perform and while I may not like to hear someone (me?) butcher a well-loved piece by going off the deep end on it, I will certainly defend their right to do so, as I hope they will defend mine when it comes my turn to make a bad choice. If folks don’t like the way it sounds, they will not try to remember or imitate it, and that version will die its own deserved death. Hopefully a better arranged interpretation will survive.

 

-- By Roland Vinyard

* Note:  “amused” does not necessarily mean “pleased”

Fun at Slow Jed's

My first performance at Slow Jed's in Averill Park was more fun than a barrel of drunken monkeys. I'll be back there on April 27, so mark your calendars. It's a great little coffeehouse and worth the trip.