In April 2016,
McFarland Publishers issued my book, Dwight
Diller: West Virginia Mountain Musician, Number 39, “Contributions to
Southern Appalachian Studies,” Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and
Company, Inc., April 2016). Since then, I have become involved in several post-publication projects, including
an ongoing series of articles on Dwight’s banjo playing for Banjo Newsletter,
entitled “Dillerology.”
Archival Work:
I accumulated about
seven inches of CDs and DVDs representing field audio and visual recordings of
Dwight at festivals, in jams, at concerts, as well as video and audio
recordings of his banjo workshops, and other media records of his playing from
1980 to 2000 or so. I’m transfering
these to the Yew Pine Mountains non profit, now relocated to West Virginia,
where Dwight Diller and Michael Brooks will make these available to interested
folks.
Early Tunes CD: During my work on the book, many people provided me with tape
cassettes of Dwight’s music captured at jams and gatherings, in banjo
workshops, band practice sessions and elsewhere, as early as 1970, over a
decade before Dwight began recording his music.
Gene Bowlen, who runs Bearcade Recording and Sound, harvested tunes from
old, informal field recordings and converted them to a CD format. My “liner notes” will be made available –
electronically - to those who elected the “early tunes” CD dividend during
Gene’s Kickstarter campaign.
Diller Field Collection Work: The Hammons Family: Between
July 1969 and July 1970, Diller conducted at least 30 separate visits to the
homes of the Hammons family members to record them telling stories and playing
tunes. In late 2015 Carl Fleischhauer
and I collaborated on a manuscript that attempts
to determine the manner in which tapes were archived, protected, and utilized
following the completion of the Library of Congress project in 1973 through to
the points in 1988 and 2005 when Diller called upon this collection as a
resource for his own projects intended to depict the lives of the Hammons
family members.
Diller’s Repertoire and Musical Development: I
wrote a manuscript that attempted to define the contexts that contributed to
shaping Dwight’s earliest music, discern the trajectory of his musical
development, sort through the influences that helped shaped the way he thought
about and practiced old time banjo and fiddle, discuss his notion of the manner
in which his own sound emerged from these influences, look closely at his
repertoire, and comment on the nature and character of West Virginian
traditional music. This, and the
co-authored piece, are currently under review for possible publication in two
different periodicals.
Diller’s West Virginia-ness: One final, ongoing manuscript
project: Dwight experimented with all
manner of notions intended to shed light on the content of the West Virginian
character. He looked hard for a way to
express the spirit, energy and wisdom of people who had survived everything
life had thrown at them. One concept,
formulated in the context of these projects to preserve the stories and the
music and the images of the old people, was the notion of “cultural
messages.” These were inherent in, and
integral to, the music, the poetry, the writings and the simple acts of living
life that make up the West Virginian way.
I am working on a paper that will speak to the way Dwight thought about
his West Virginia-ness.
* * *
If the work on the
biography of Dwight underscored one thing to me – the research, the detective
work, the interviews with nearly 90 friends and fellow musicians – it was that
many in Dwight’s generation of old time musicians, including those between 65
and 75 years of age now, have lead productive, inventive, creative musical
lives that have to a considerable extent gone undocumented. And, perhaps to a similar extent, the musical
communities that these musicians either spawned or encouraged have similarly
gone without book-length studies – with a few exceptions (such as John Beale’s
incredible book on Bloomington, Indiana).
I’m finding plenty of work to be done in these areas – both biographic
and community-focused profiles.
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