My fiddle buddy LJ came over again today. Prior to
our second meeting today we agreed via email to focus in on two tunes of his
choosing, Cripple Creek and Buffalo Gals, though in the end he added
Wildwood Flower to the mix.
I also got LJ to agree to leave behind his music stand,
his sheet music, and his other paraphernalia and just haul the fiddle with
him. I thought he’d be reluctant to step away from the stuff he uses to
learn the tunes, but he agreed that in the end laboring over the notes keeps us
from hearing what we’re each playing so he bit the bullet.
LJ wanted to press on beyond these three core tunes, but I
preferred playing each of them over repeatedly, in a formula of AABB x3 just so
we’d have a starting point because each of us seemed to vary the way we’d go
through tunes, sometimes selecting an ABAB approach, and sometimes stopping
after AB, frequently bringing things up short and at other times just running
on and on with the tune. So we came to an agreement on that, and stuck
with it, just so we’d have a ground rule in this start-up phase.
LJ goes in more for bluegrass versions, and derives a lot
of his musical motivation from country western and Texas swing type
tunes. I tend to stick to the old time way of playing tunes.
We had to work hard to come up with mid-way points that allowed us to bridge
the gaps between our approaches.
Between attempts to get at these three core tunes, we’d
drift off into conversation, or let our fingers do the walking up and down our
respective instruments – and other tunes would irrepressibly pop out.
We’d each grab at snatches of stuff we recognized. I heard him doodling
around with Red River Valley, a tune
I haven’t really thought of for 40 years. I sort of last remember taking
a crack at it because of something Pete Seeger played. We got close on
that one. And we found some common ground on Amazing Grace.
He whipped out Angeline
the Baker, but to my ears we were worlds apart on that. His Angeline
sounds like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uja3jOgLl2U
and mine sounds more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RsqmK-zlO8
In fact, Dwight taught me that tune during one of his visits to our northern
Virginia home some years back.
There’s got to be a halfway point, and our mutually
assigned homework is to find a middle ground between each. I suppose a
middle ground would have less to do with the speed of the tune than with other
things – tempo, spirit, and so forth. I don’t think our differences in
approach particular tunes are just that he likes the speedier bluegrass
versions and I tend to stay with the archaic versions. So, figuring out
how to kluge these approaches together is our challenge.
As we were breaking camp, LJ wondered whether I knew a
tune he had been spending some time on – I think the name of the tune slipped
his mind for a moment. He cracked out a nice, distinctive version of Soldier’s Joy. I dropped into
Double C and we went at that tune for about ten minutes, surprised to have
found another tune we could play together without struggling to find a
compromise version that would allow us to put our two instruments
together.
We played for about 90 minutes before other business
intervened and we had to pack it in.
Now usually my two hounds, Maggie and Roxie, go nuts
during basement jams. They like to dance and run around while the banjos
are going. But with the fiddle they grew calm, took to their bed, and lay
their dreamily listening to the music – no matter whether we were playing up
tempo or having a crack at slower tunes. I may have to keep a CD with
fiddle music running all the time as a form of hound-focused crowd
control.
I’ll probably continue to blog about our progress.
This is turning out to be a lot less work and a lot more fun than either of us
anticipated.
Play hard,
Lew
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