I finally had the good
fortune to sit down with the excellent fiddler, Mary Jane Epps, who in 2015 moved
to Staunton, Virginia, from North Carolina where she earned a well-deserved
reputation as a fine fiddler, a spirited player, who handles the instrument
with confidence, and plays with clarity, consistency and energy. She’s a great playing partner for a banjoist. She made it easy for me to play alongside of
her. We tried Red Wing, Soldier’s Joy, Walking in the Parlor, Blackeyed Suzie. We also took a crack at Hop High Ladies, not a new tune for me but one I need to work on
largely because I’ve not played it with a fiddler before (and so have probably
cut a lot of the interesting edges off the tune). And Mary Jane played Leather Britches for me, a tune I had heard before but never
attempted to find on the banjo . I’ve been listening to versions of that
tune online, trying to burn it into my brain, assuming the brain is at least
marginally relevant to learning banjo tunes.
I try, when playing
alongside a fiddler, to balance listening to my own playing and following the
fiddler, an intellectual high wire act if there ever was one. The two tasks seem at times to clash, and it
generally takes me a while before I can read the fiddler, and discern what the
fiddler intends to do with a tune. Until
I break the code, I sort of straddle listening to my own playing, and following
the contours of what the fiddler is doing with the tune. When I listen to my own playing, I end up
trying to stay true to the way I learned the tune instead of serving the
interests of the fiddler. Once I’ve at
least partially, tentatively figured out how the fiddler goes about getting at
a tune, I can focus more closely on doing what I need to do to support the
fiddler, to add a rhythmic underpinning to the fiddler’s way of doing
tunes. Mary Jane made getting to that
point easy, or at least comfortable and genuinely fun.
This time, it took me a
while before I managed to have a glimmer of understanding of what I should be
doing to work effectively alongside Mary Jane.
I suppose I was looking for what it should sound like, feel like, when I
finally hit upon the right place where I can play the banjo to the fiddle – the
place where I could find an “automatic pilot” and figure out, as we moved a
tune along, what I had to do on my banjo to make the fiddling sound more
interesting, to complement it gently, and usher the sound in the right
direction. What I had to do to play the
tune with the fiddler without knocking things out of balance – getting louder
than I should be, or playing too assertively and independently of the fiddler’s
way with the tune. I had to find the
balance so that I wasn’t hijacking the song or pushing things too far away from
where the fiddle was doing what it was meant to do, and the banjo was nudging
the enterprise along in just the right equation of sound. I found my “fiddler’s ear,” as I called it,
after about four or five tunes – the hearing capability that allowed me to know
where the banjo should be, and what would be best to do to serve the
fiddler.
That’s when we decided to
break, to pack up the instruments, and to meet again when life permitted – and
I hope it is soon enough that my “fiddler’s ear” is still hearing things right
enough to let me do good by the tune, to do good by my fiddler.
I need to do a better job
at keeping track of the tunes we run through, and the tunings Mary Jane plays
them out of. I know Mary Jane played Walking in the Parlor in G, Soldiers Joy in A, Hop High in G and Redwing in A.
We couldn’t quite agree on whether or not we had a common starting point
for Waynesboro, so we deferred that
tune for another time. It was clear to
me that I need to work more carefully on Hop
High Ladies. I’ve never really
played that with a fiddler, and I seem to have smoothed out, simplified or
sanded down the interesting parts that are so integral to this tune as a fiddle
tune.
Mary Jane told me that she
hasn’t really kept a tune list current for a while, and I don’t really have a
comprehensive list of tunes I play confidently enough to try alongside a
fiddler. That left Mary Jane and I staring
at the ceiling and trying to come up with common ground. I probably need to return to my older
practice of keeping track of tunes I know, and keeping an active list of tunes
I want to learn.
Leather Britches is on the top of the latter list, since Mary Jane plays such a
rousing, fluent version of that tune.
I’ll probably post some Youtube and Banjo Hangout “test drives” of the
tune over the next few months. If you
tune in to listen, please be gentle and grade on a curve.
Play hard,
Lew
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