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Fiddling
I've played violin for a bit more than 30 years -- except that for about 20 of them, I wasn't playing violin. Suzuki lessons from about 5 years old to about 14 years old, quit in disgust, took it back up when I was 35. I have a lot of fun with it nowadays.
If you're looking for abc notation of fiddle tunes, be sure to check out The Fiddler's Companion.
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Hm, haven't posted any fiddling in a while. Here is me playing an arrangement of "This land is your land" by Woody Guthrie.
Mountain Station played a song today at the Saturday Afternoon Song Swap in Millburn, and it was a lot of fun. Highlight of the afternoon was (maybe) the song (by a musician whose name I did not catch, rats) based on a Chinese funeral scroll that I need to find out more about.
posted evening of February second, 2013: 1 response ➳ More posts about Music
Latest addition to my repertory is "Billy in the Lowground," which I've been wanting to learn ever since I saw the Ether Frolic Mob playing it. Here are two takes:
Here, in no particular order, are the songs I know well enough to think of them as my repertory (excluding numerous songs like "Crawdad Hole" and "Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe" which, while I can play a pretty nice instrumental version, I think of as songs to sing. These are just the songs that I identify primarily as fiddle tunes.) Criteria for this list is, I have to know the melody by heart (after maybe a glance at the music) and be able to play it easily with improvisation over the melody and be able to cover up for myself ifwhen I make a mistake.
The Red-Haired Boy
The Sailor's Hornipe
The Devil's Dream
Bill Cheetham
The Halting March
Harvest Home
The Boys of Bluehill
The Growling Old Man and the Carping Old Woman
The Road to Lisdoonvarna
The Irish Washerwoman
The Swallowtail Jig
East Tennessee Blues
Billy in the Lowground
Soldier's Joy
Whiskey Before Breakfast
The Modesto Kid
Jeremy's Breakdown
Drowsy Maggie
Bonaparte's Retreate/ Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine/ Bonaparte Crossing the Rocky Mountains
Two new songs to learn, that I printed out music for today: "St. Anne's Reel" and "Ragtime Annie".
posted morning of April 29th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Songbook
I was at the song swap this afternoon -- for the first time -- I am certainly going to be going back there, and to hope that Deena and Rebecca ask us to perform there sometime. What a great pool of talent! I played "Devil's Dream", and I still can't quite believe how fast I played it -- for weeks now I have been thinking, "well, I'm playing it much slower than the standard tempo; but on the other hand I'm getting a really sweet, romantic sound in that slow pace"; but it turns out one can also get a really sweet, romantic sound in a fast tempo, too! I think I was still not playing just as fast as the bluegrass fiddlers I've heard playing this song... But just being in front of the audience really pushed me, drove me into the song. I also played (a bit slower, but again faster than I have been practicing the song) a new composition called (bet you never did) "The Modesto Kid". -- I also recorded that tune and am loving listening to it. Probably will upload to Soundcloud soon.
There is a huge body of fiddle tunes that I think of as "standards". Diverse sources, Appalachia, Ireland, Manitoba, Cape Breton, Scandinavia, the Old West... I've historically felt pretty diffident about my performances of the standards, like I don't play them fast enough or sincerely enough. But that is changing! In the past couple of weeks -- really starting in February when I recorded my take on The Sailor's Hornpipe -- I feel like I'm really enjoying playing these old tunes, and coming up with some pretty decent, enjoyable tunes for listening to. They're pretty off-beat, new and different -- my own sound at last! Here is the list so far of the recordings that I have liked well enough to upload for you to listen to:
East Tennessee Blues -- credited to Charlie Bowman. This song is younger than the others, probably written in the early 1960's. Written in 1926.
Old Joe Clark -- a mountain ballad from eastern Kentucky, first printed in 1918.
The Red-Haired Boy -- I think this is an Irish tune, although I associate it with Boston.
Camptown Races -- composed by Stephen Foster in the mid-19th Century.
Whiskey Before Breakfast -- credited to Canadian fiddler Andy de Jarlis. (Or possibly it is "a traditional tune made popular by de Jarlis")
Bill Cheetham -- I can't find much more information about this than that it is "traditional" .
The Devil's Dream -- a popular English dance tune from the 1800's. I have never heard it played any other way than very fast, but I think this slower arrangement is pretty catchy.
Listening to these in sequence, I think I'm improving, and also I am getting better at putting the videos together. Naturally still much room for improvement in both regards, but...
The latest addition to The Kitchen Tapes is my arrangement of Nat King Cole's "Frim Fram Sauce" -- and right now it feels like this playlist is complete, it encapsulates my sound very nicely. I'm going to keep recording songs and uploading them to YouTube or SoundCloud or whatever other such service; but The Kitchen Tapes playlist will remain as is -- I'll start working on the next playlist. I've been doing a lot of asking friends to listen to it and link to it over the past week or so -- if you are one such friend I hope you don't mind the spamminess of it all. (And thanks for the link, cleek!) Very happy and proud about how the tapes are sounding -- I have this thought in mind that somehow if enough people put the link out, it could find an audience not composed solely of my close friends and family... If you listen to it and like what you hear, do me a favor and pass it along.
(What I mean to say, I'm really excited about having made a record.)
Reading Fug You this morning, I had a pleasant surprise -- a photo of old favorite Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band playing, and right in front is Maria D'Amato on the fiddle! I had completely forgotten she played violin, have just thought of her as a singer for years now.
So I've got some inspiration for the weekend, I want to get "Richland Woman Blues" happening on fiddle. (Also, I want to record "John Hardy was a desperate man", which I've been working on this week.)
Here is a bit of reminiscence about Maria, from Joe Boyd's White Bicycles. Joe went to the 1962 Cornell Folk Festival with Geoff Muldaur:
"We got lost on the campus and by the time we arrived the show - a double bill of Sleepy John Estes and Doc Watson - was over. At the post-gig party, the two men - both blind - sang old hymns shared by the white and black communities of the rural south. We noticed a dark-eyed beauty with a long black braid accompanying the Watson party on fiddle or keeping time with a set of bones. Geoff was too shy to talk to her, but swore that he would marry her. It was the young Maria D'Amato..."
posted evening of February 24th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Fug You
There is a huge body of fiddle tunes that I think of as "standards". Diverse sources, Appalachia, Ireland, Manitoba, Cape Breton, Scandinavia, the Old West... I've historically felt pretty diffident about my performances of the standards, like I don't play them fast enough or sincerely enough. But that is changing! In the past couple of weeks -- really starting in February when I recorded my take on 
Reading Fug You this morning, I had a pleasant surprise -- a photo of old favorite Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band playing, and right in front is Maria D'Amato on the fiddle! I had completely forgotten she played violin, have just thought of her as a singer for years now.