For the most part, the
fiddlers and banjo players who played the old time music in West Virginia's Pocahontas County and
several neighboring counties including Randolph had their own distinctive
sounds, their own unique ways of making music.
They made very individual
music – to the point that after a while, without seeing the player, it became
easy for West Virginian old time musicians to know sight unseen whether, for
example, it was Lee Hammons or Sherman or Burl playing.
These musicians may have
emulated the sound of one or more of the old time musicians, but as one
musician remarked “we played what we heard.”
And as some of the now
older musicians who learned the old tunes in their youthful years recall, what
they heard was as varied as it was distinctive.
So much of the music, and
the way the older musicians rendered the music, was distinctive, and each
musician played uniquely – or at least not consistently – from one time to the
next.
The lesson from all this
that became part of the intellectual equipment of West Virginian old time
musicians who learned the music in the sixties and seventies was that there is
no right sound: “We don’t all have to
sound alike.”
The old timers were
extemporaneous in their playing, playful in cooking up unique renditions, and
not at all bound by formulas or beholden to the manner in which they first
heard the tune.
Ø
One musician recently
observed ”Big Scioty” is definitely from Burl Hammons, but Burl played the high
part crooked, though he wasn't always consistent in his crookedness.
Ø
And another
added that sometimes he'd played the
high part straight and sometimes he'd play the low part crooked.
That means there is
not one particular West Virginia sound.
As one West Virginian musician remarked: “People in my generation
sounded like themselves, but the people we learned from sounded like
themselves, too”.
West Virginia
musicians were not modeling a technique.
Round Peak players
were modeling a technique.
Even in wanting to
capture, for example, Lee Hammons’ technique, West Virginian banjo players were
looking for the sound they heard, and ended up doing some things differently to
get that sound. They were playing to the
sound, not the technique.
In Round Peak music,
which at least in one interpretation evolved out of recorded music from the
1920s, there is more of a tradition of a “particular sound” emerging as the
central focus of the music that, in some ways, evolved to accommodate the
banjo.
Ø West Virginia music has more fiddle and
Round Peak is more heavily weighted toward banjo content, and in Round Peak the
banjo-fiddle duet developed to a far greater extent than is the case in West
Virginia where in many cases (especially eastern central West Virginia) old
time music is not ensemble music.
Ø
There were notable
exceptions – Melvin Wine played with his brother Clarence, but overall the
sound of West Virginia music was less band oriented than Round Peak music.
John Morris, David
O’Dell, Jimmy Costa “. . . all these banjo players would say ‘I’m a West
Virginia’ banjo player,’ and they’d all be right. But none of us sounded alike.” One musician argued:
I don’t think people
tried to capture the Hammons sound. If
you went to the festivals you’d hear Round Peak. You did not hear that focus on West Virginia
when you went to fiddle conventions in Virginia [and at the festivals] in West
Virginia people were playing their own sound. People didn’t have to play a certain
sound to authenticate themselves.
However, people who
did not grow up with music did not necessarily have the confidence in their
sound. And so they went after a sound and “that’s the way they authenticated
themselves.”
Odell McGuire was a
significant influence on Dwight, and he had very strong opinions on old time
music. At least one musician recollects
that McGuire was geared to the Round Peak sound.
Round Peak banjo players
had a very particular sound as their musical goal.
The West Virginia
musician’s perspective was that there’s not one right way of playing the
music: “The banjo is a rhythm
instrument. That part has to be right,
[but] there’s not only one way to get to the rhythm.”
And that might capture the
central difference in view between Dwight and McGuire as it shaped up between
1970 and 1975.
Does any of this ring true for you?
Thanks.
V/R,
Lew
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