Am I in the cool yet? After 20 years of blogging!?

Oh my! The second pandemic year of 2021 is almost over and I haven't added a new page here since December 2019! Here's a lot of catching up in a short space... and a plug for one of my most recent musical discoveries -- not an old video clip like previous entries here, but a podcast that has accumulated something like 300 hours of music and musician interviews, "Get Up In the Cool." Its name, by the way, is from a tune recorded in 1929 by Eck Robertson that makes me think about climbing up to Rocky Knob in Floyd, Va., on a hot summer day. But the podcast is cool in another way. More about that in a minute. First, a couple of my own short smartphone video clips...

I have been playing and listening to music at home and at outdoor jam sessions like that one on the street in Floyd and others in Blacksburg and Radford, Va., after social-distancing rules and vaccination made sharing music possible again. And I have been writing about those things -- but on Facebook and YouTube, not here. 

The Floyd Country Store Sunday afternoon jams eventually moved back indoors, as shown above, but as winter approaches, most of the others still have not found homes. Online through 2020 and 2021, I have attended Floyd Country Store, Floyd Handmade Music School and Augusta Heritage Workshop friends' "Zoom" and YouTube events, and finally -- "armed" with two vaccinations, a booster and flu shot, went to the October Augusta Heritage Center Old-Time Retreat for music classes, jams, and even some singing and dancing.

Alas, the week I returned was the start of a month-long cold that made sleeping through the night difficult, but even that was an excuse for musical discovery: I'd heard of, but had not explored, an oldtime fiddle-and-banjo oriented podcast called "Get Up In the Cool," which turned out to be a wonderful way to spend those sleepless nights. 

Before I started listening, banjo virtuoso and interviewer Cameron DeWhitt had already accumulated 270 interview-jams with fiddlers and banjo players across the U.S. and Canada, including current friends and teachers of mine from Ithaca to Dittyville -- and even Hank Bradley, an inspiring guitar, banjo and fiddle player I studied with back around 1978 and have not seen since!

I hope all of these links aren't overwhelming... but at least I feel I'm getting caught up on the latest incarnation of Blogger, including the ability to easily post my YouTube clips and switch between a modern "Compose view" and vintage 20th century "HTML view" of the page I'm writing.

Blog history... 

In addition to noticing that I have been neglecting this blog for almost two years, I noticed today that this blog is now 20 years old! Hosted-for-free blogs are like that... people lose interest, regain interest... sometimes they even die. I knew a "serial blogger" called Jimbo -- interested in music and old-time radio -- who died a few years ago, leaving behind probably thousands of pages of his writing on linked-together podcasts and blogs about various 1930s to 1960s radio shows, none of them signed with his real name.

My "Blogger" site started in a classroom at Emerson College, where I taught a freshmen seminar called "Digital Culture: Mediamorphosis," in which students explored media history while learning to use Web tools and Photoshop. The second time I taught the course, one of the students asked why I was having the class write raw HTML code on a campus server to create what I called "weblogs" when there was a new tool called Blogger designed to do the same thing with less work. 

The point was that I wanted the class to learn about the page-markup language that was "behind the curtain" at all websites. But I was embarrassed. I had used a couple of other "edit this page" online publishing sites, but at that point Blogger (or "Blogspot") was off my radar, so of course I gave it a try. And this site is the result. Over the years I would create other blogs and websites with Radio Userland, Manila, WordPress, Django, Drupal and more. 

But this one -- thanks to Google's ownership -- is the oldest of my "free hosting" sites. This "Boblog" has evolved over the years from classroom-discussion demo to regular postings, either personal or journalism-class-related (especially 2008-2009 at Radford U, after my Radio Userland host went out of business and while I was in transition to WordPress), and finally reborn as an occasional space for writing about music, while my other sites, stepno.com, jheroes.com and stepno.wordpress.com fill other needs.

Another vintage mountain ukulele player

Just discovered both "The Syncopated Times" and -- in passing -- Iver Edwards, ukulele and harmonica player from Galax, Va., in the 1920s, pictured holding what looks like a soprano Martin ukulele in a band photo accompanying this article about vintage recordings:

https://syncopatedtimes.com/fred-hager-and-the-birth-of-country-music/?fbclid=IwAR0MxtZjyRCAoleqof-W7AUnmx_bUmYGn3ZKy9xsUDSXLZvksBY9Lrv6BFI

Discogs says of Edwards, "(1906 - 1960) American old-time musician (harmonica - ukulele). Recorded with Ernest Stoneman on the Victor label c.1927-28."

Now I'm going through Ernest Stoneman records on YouTube listening for telltale ukulele plinking in the background. Easy to loose it in the similar-octave strumming of the autoharp and mandolin, such as that heard on Stoneman's famous Titanic recording...


https://youtu.be/skSUX7pNmSU 

Hop Light Ladies may have been one where Iver put down the uke and played the harmonica...
https://youtu.be/boE8U3wAUC4

New River Train might have a ukulele in there, mostly smothered by the banjo...
https://youtu.be/nQzRrLuWOE0

I'll keep listening.

Tunes to Learn (or at least play along with)

Mac's Tune of the Week

I'm making some shortcuts to this local Southwest Virginia tune list, via Mac Traynham and the Floyd Country Store's Handmade Music School...

1. downbeat... one?
2. two?
3. three?
4. Shootin' Creek
5. Flying Indian
6. Sweet Grapes
7. Cuffy
8. Rachel
9. coming soon?
   
   Bonus:
     A thank-you to Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck for contributing to the support of the music program

Country vs Folk ... Sigh...

Someone posted a question on Facebook asking people more or less my age whether they thought John Denver's hit "Take Me Home Country Roads" was "a country song," the topic apparently being part of the aftermath of the Ken Burns PBS series on country music.

I wrote this off the top of my head in reply, but I may come back here and change it if I decide I said anything I disagree with.

I believe from its 1920s beginning "country" has been a commercial music merchandising term to which people add whatever cultural baggage they want... and the industry was gradually Consolidated in Nashville ...

John Denver wasn't part of that Nashville Centric particular marketing / performance venue / Publications/ radio DJ system, at least in the beginning.

He crept in through the separate short-lived  commercial "folk music" scene exemplified by the Kingston Trio and the early 1960s ABC Hootenanny TV show -- starring, among others, the Chad Mitchell Trio, which dropped Chad's first name when John replaced him. As the British Invasion rockscene took over teen culture, increasingly singer-songwritery "folk" college coffee houses and concerts and festivals kept going... (Bruce "Utah" Phillips had a great rap about my preferred part of the scene, performers like him who, unlike John Denver, did not want to be pop stars on any Billboard Chart and were more interested in "making a living, not a killing.")

That folk music scene and folk pop scene in the 1960s and 1970s had a different network of performance venues (college concerts included), radio programs (college FM), network television programs, PBS specials, and as the folk pop thing branched off what became a singer songwriter soft rock thing, some of the audience  overlapped and  migrated toward "country."

Meanwhile as "country" went through overproduced pop phases, the cleaner acoustic guitar and vocal sound and homespun lyrics of Denver, his collaborators, and a few other folk scene refugees became more acceptable to Nashville industry fans...

It's music. it's marketing. And it's listeners who don't give a crap and tune in what they like, when they can find it. Maybe they sing along. Maybe they play the songs at their local coffee house or open mic. Maybe they don't debate what label to put on something.

My first fiddle contest....

I didn't play the fiddle then... And I barely do now... And I didn't compete in any contest, but in the 1970s the New England Fiddle Contest in Hartford was one of the major landmarks in each year... And in one or two of them I got to write articles or take pictures that wound up in the Hartford Courant... Including this 1979 story, which the late Paul Lemay, organizer of the contest, included in the press kit he sent out each year, along with the picture or two that I had taken... I was reminded today that the internet archive had saved parts of his FiddleFest website, launched when he revived the contest around 1998 or 1999.

Alas, someone let the domain registration go after Paul died, so the original site is no longer about fiddling.

1924 mountain ukulele?

This YouTube clip of a 1924 recording of Ida Red by Fiddlin' Powers and Family is accompanied by a photograph showing a young lady in the band holding a ukulele, so off I went searching for written sources about the group and the ukulele player in particular.

Success! This article by Rene Rodgers at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol answered my question as fast as I could type it into Google. The youngest sister's name was Ada, and there is another picture of her with her ukulele at the Museum website! Alas, the article mentions that she moved on to the Autoharp, and doesn't say much about her ukulele playing, so maybe she only played ukulele during her early days as a musician. That was true for me too, as I moved on to guitar and banjo and mandolin and didn't get back to the ukulele for about 30 years!

 It looks like the young women of the Powers family were progressive in other ways too... those bobbed hairdos look pretty modern. But that's a topic for a different kind of blog.

See my previous posts, "In search of the mountain ukulele," and "Dr. Bates ukulele playing daughter."

Blacksburg Farmers Market Oldtime Jams

"What tunes do you play at those 'old time music' jam sessions?"

I can generally rattle off a dozen tune names, not that I really play all of the tunes that well... but there are dozens.

Inspiration...

Woody McKenzie, fiddler-host of this week's Wednesday night old-time string band jam session at the Blacksburg Farmers Market had a request for a more complete tune list.... someone running an old-time jam up in New England wanted to be able to link their Facebook page to an authentic tune list from down here and Southwest Virginia.

So I made this blog page to hold whatever lists I can come up with, then he or anyone else can point newcomers, students, or prospective Jam leaders to this page... without necessarily belonging to any of the proliferating Facebook old time music discussion groups.

There is an annual list compiled by one of the local musicians, tracking the popularity of tunes played at the Blacksburg Farmers Market through the year, under a variety of host fiddlers and bands. I hope the gentleman who compiles it can provide it in a format suitable for posting here. An older version from a few years ago was posted to the Crooked Road website, and I'm going to link to that one, if it is still available.

Meanwhile, one of the several bands that lead the Wednesday jam, Happy Hollow String Band, has a website with an impressive playlist of its own, sometimes with  chord charts or music for the tunes:

http://happyhollowstringband.com

A few counties south of us, the Independence Courthouse Jam (https://historic1908courthouse.org/events/old-time-mountain-music-jam/) also has an interesting one, sorted by key:

http://216.172.176.132/~courthouse/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/JamTunesUpdated2015-12-23.pdf

These are all primarily fiddle-centric old-time stringband dance music jams, where everyone plays together, rather than bluegrass jams where participants take turns showing their stuff on lead breaks.

The Independence web page describes its round-robin jam format, where participants take turns either leading or requesting a tune, or sometimes the song.  In Floyd and Blacksburg, old-time jams are a little different, in that the lead fiddler or host band choose all or most of the tunes, maybe with a little group discussion or a newcomer's occasional suggestion.

No matter who leads, I tend to have fun anywhere that I can find a few of the tunes on my mandolin, or strum some rhythm chords on it or a banjo ukulele -- when that seems acceptable to the leaders of the group... especially if I'm pretty sure I'm going to be drowned out by other banjos and fiddles.