Fiddles and strings

Joy and learning

Ok, I was provoked to write this post after reading a post by

David Marlow

(who I highly recommend) on “what do you want to learn this year?”. Among other things, I listed learning (and playing well) 10 new fiddle tunes. And THAT started a conversation with

White Rose Publications

about fiddling and tunes and instruments, and I decided I needed a space to talk about music generally, and fiddling in particular, starting with my journey to the fiddle.

When I was a boy, we had a Heintzman upright grand piano that my father occasionally played (it was his mother’s piano). My oldest sister was given lessons and passed through the Royal Conservatory lessons to Gr. 13. The second oldest sister took lessons but abandoned them at Gr. 2. I was next in line and… no lessons for me, although I often picked out tunes on it.

When I was old enough to start earning my own money at about the age of 11, I started to cut lawns in the neighborhood and had a weekend paper route delivering the Detroit News. Saving my money I bought my first guitar from an appliance store in our small town. I still remember getting it out of the case on the way home and picking out a tune on it. A friend of mine had a guitar also and we traded chords and music back and forth, but my main instruction came in the form of Gordon Lightfoot records—he always published a songbook when a new album came out, with the lyrics and chords. I also learned by ear and got so that I could hear chords/chord changes in my head when listening to a song on the radio.

I was a folkie and all of the great singer-songwriters from the late 60’s/70’s were my my idols. I bought and traded guitars and started to play a bit at local coffee houses and was part of a trio with two young women, one of whom was a brilliant pianist and arranger. We sang a lot of 3-part harmony and had a lot of fun.

By university, I was getting into bluegrass and picked up the banjo which I found a much more technical instrument to play than the guitar, which had always come naturally to me. I took some lessons to get started with it but it was never a “performance” instrument for me.

Fast forward about 20 years, and my father, out of the blue, gave me a fiddle. My grandfather had been outlived by his last wife by several years, and when she died my grandfather’s estate was distributed, and in it was a fiddle! It had been my great-grandfather’s fiddle, and he had played dances in the Woodstock area of Ontario back in the 1920’s. It is hard to believe now, but if you can imagine entertainment before even radio was available, the Saturday Night Dance at the local community hall was the place to be and the “band” was typically fiddle/bass/guitar and sometimes some brass and drums.

(In fact… Woody Guthrie used a very popular fiddle tune, “Red Wing”, to write the song “Union Maid” around 1931. Red Wing is one of my favorite fiddle tunes and I have introduced business students to “Union Maid” by playing it in class. But I digress…).

For several years I would take the fiddle out from time to time to look at it, but it had no strings. After I moved to the west coast I fell in with a group of musical friends one of whom played the fiddle, and I was urged to get some strings on it to see what it sounded like, so I did. The sound was ok but it was clear the instrument needed some work: a new tailpiece, bridge, and a bit of work on the neck later I had a very playable instrument.

In a music store I saw a poster for “fiddle camp” and after checking that adults were welcome I signed myself up for a week in the woods of British Columbia learning my first jigs, reels, and waltzes. Old Time Fiddlers pass tunes along teaching “by ear” with little written down, and that is how I learned to play initially, although I did teach myself how to read music for the first time (guitar and banjo music is typically written as chords or tab so I hadn’t needed to learn to read music prior to that). After going to fiddle camp three years in a row and working on learning other tunes (especially the banjo tunes I already knew that were really fiddle tunes transposed to the banjo), I got to the point I could “play”. It was a ton of fun!

But the last 10-15 years of life have had little time for musical pursuits, and I am just now getting back into it. The hands are not as flexible and resist doing what my mind is convinced they can, but it is joyful getting back into practicing again.

So all of this (if you have gotten this far) is by way of introducing a conversation and sharing about music and tunes.

I am frequently searching for a recording of a tune I half remember and a great source is this one: the North Atlantic Tune list. Its source list includes music from Scotland, Ireland, and North America, and I like it because it usually has both the sheet music and an mp3 recording of a song.

Given Old Time music’s aural tradition, there is rarely an “authorative” version of a song so I often listen to muliple sources of a tune before I settle in to learn how to play it.

From the North Atlantic site, here are some of my favs:

Red Wing
Red Haired Boy
In Memory of Herbie McLeod
Road to Boston
Swallowtail’s Jig
Temperance Reel
which you need to pair with (of course)
Whiskey Before Breakfast
… but the version I play is closer to Patti Kusturak’s version on Youtube

Youtube is a great source for learning fiddle tunes. Here are a few I like from there:

Devil’s Dream
(this guy plays it at an insane speed, and this is a teaching video lol!! But the instruction is really great and I have learned a ton from this although I can’t play this tune nearly as well as this guy plays it).

Neil Gow’s Lament
(this is a nice version, but I learned this tune initially from Natalie McMaster’s album. So beautiful!)

Golden Slippers
This is again Patti Kusturak, and I can’t play it like she does but I love it.

And so many more.

What do you play? What instruments? What songs? SHARE in the comments and happy playing!!