Busking on the Fiddle (Old Aunt Jenny With her Night Cap On)

 

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of the tune Old Aunt Jenny with Her Night Cap On from a jam in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. It is very hot today in Baltimore and I have the air conditioning and the fan turned off so they don't interfere with the sound of the podcast. But, holy cow, I got to run through the rest of the recording here and get it off, because it is quite warm right now in Baltimore and, I believe, in the rest of the country too. We're talking about busking today. 

Busking is when you play on the street for money. I used to busk when I was in college mainly. I did a few times in Rochester for various reasons, but the main time I busked I would buy a ticket to New York City. I had some. Especially just after college a lot of musicians from my school went to New York to try to make it in New York and I would fly there and visit folks. 

But I didn't have a lot of money, so I'd get myself a ticket on JetBlue and fly in and then busk in the subway to make the money for my trip, to have food to eat and kind of help pay for the expenses, have something to buy concert tickets with, et cetera. I did a lot of busking in New York City. Most of the time didn't get a lot of attention for it. 

I think I was mostly playing fiddle tunes, but people would stop a lot and they would ask is that a violin or a fiddle? So I had to. You know, learn jokes and things to say about that. I think I have a podcast episode called what's the Difference Between a Violin and a Fiddle, With a collection of some of those jokes. 

There wasn't really anything to it. I never got a license, which you probably need now. This was back in the early aughts. I just got off the plane, got into the subway, have my backpack on my back and my violin. Those were the only things I had. So open the case up and play the fiddle and get money in the case. These days you often need a license to busk. 

There's also a pretty new phenomenon now that happens that I've seen quite a few times, which is the sort of fake busking. I don't know if any of you have seen this. Someone will be holding a violin or a fiddle and it'll be plugged in and amplified but the sound coming out of the speaker is canned. It's just some recording. 

You know, if you play you can tell. I've seen a few people playing amplified where it's real, but a lot of times when the sound is amplified it's not. And sometimes a person knows how to play the violin and is playing something sort of similar to what's coming out and sometimes it really seems like they uh, yeah, like they're just pretending, like those actors on TV who sort of move their arms back and forth Like you would if one were playing the violin. There's no, uh, there's no evidence of muscle memory or familiarity with the motor movement. I see that I guess I try to give money to buskers, but I don't think I've given money to people who were just faking it with the violin. 

You get requests when you busk. Probably the biggest request I got was just Devil Went Down to Georgia, which is a hard thing to pull off. On solo fiddle I had a couple things I could do. I could play that fire on the mountain part and I could do a little bit of the devil's solo, a couple special effects. It was usually enough. People ask for stuff like Cotton Eye Joe or Dueling Banjos or Turkey in the Straw. 

If I was playing a lot of fiddle, you know, one thing I like to do is sometimes if there was a background, there's a background sound that had a pitch, like a horn or a motor or something I'd play along with that A beep playing with a beeping noise. I've done that. I've gotten gifts. I've been sketched when I've been busking. I don't still have any of those sketches, but I remember that happening. 

That's something that's really nice actually if you're an artist and you just sketch a little picture of someone and leave it for them. I got a couple of stories on the Facebook Fiddlers Association when I asked this what have I got? Devin Ledger said he was given a beautiful and expensive ukulele when busking. That's amazing. I've gotten random things for presents, but never a musical instrument. Mark Caudill said that he saw a wonderful violinist busking in Charlotte, north Carolina, and while he was listening a couple of kids snatched a couple dollars from the case and ran away. 

And he says the busker set down his probably $60,000 fiddle and effort it is to learn to play them and, frankly, how little we often get paid for doing it. It's a strange set of incentives, I guess you could say. John Kerr says that he had an experience at a conference where there was someone busking on the mandolin and he went out to hear this guy play and eventually the guy said well, hey, do you want to just play for me right now while I go to the bathroom and get a cup of coffee? So that was how he got pulled into busking for the first time. That's funny. 

Rob McGeorge. I went to Stewart Island off New Zealand with no return ticket and no money. So he busked and got food and a ticket, a place to stay and money. Yeah, that's yes. That's kind of how I used to do New York City Get down there, make the money to get back. And Ed Pearson had maybe my favorite comment there is busking. And there is busking during Oktoberfest in Munich, germany. 

Yeah, so busking is a different kind of proposition, when everyone will be drinking heavily. I don't know, I don't know about that. Know, I don't know about that. I may be getting too old for that. You can try busking. 

Probably my most memorable time as a listener to folks busking I heard some great musicians when we were in Dublin who were playing on the street. I really enjoyed that. But actually during the COVID lockdown we have a busker at a farmer's market that's right around the corner from my house. On Saturdays he goes by. 

If you live in Baltimore you might know this guy. He goes by Merdolf, which he told me is Merlin and Gandolf combined, all the magic, and he plays a big variety of stuff, lots of sort of folk tunes, pop tunes, all kinds of things. He plays guitar and sings. So I've been seeing him and hearing him at the market near my house for many years. 

You know, I've been coming to this market on and off for at least 10 years, probably 15. And during lockdown he wasn't out there playing. They wouldn't let him. And then the first time they let him back he had I don't know, he had, you know, whatever he had to do for singing to try to cut down on spreading any germs. But I hadn't really been hearing any live music at that point, except what we could play with you know the folks in our bubble. 

We could play with, you know the folks in our bubble. And yeah, I remember hearing him and listening to him and I was just, I was basically moved to tears. The music just made me think about everything that was happening and made me feel connected out to the world at a time when I was feeling super, super disconnected, as we all were. 

Yeah, so that was probably my most memorable experience. I think I was, yeah, just getting a little weepy, tearing up at the farmer's market listening to Merdolf play the first time he was back after lockdown. Really sweet guy, anyway, busking. If you have a good busking story you can send it to me. 

Our tune this week is Old Aunt Jenny with Her Nightcap On. This is a popular tune. I like this one. It's from West Virginia, also played in Kentucky, passed on through. Bruce Green said he learned this tune from Estill Bingham who lived in Bell County, Kentucky, near the Cumberland Gap. 

We're going to play Cumberland Gap another week but that's, of course, where Kentucky and Tennessee and Virginia all come together. A lot of tunes called Cumberland Gap but he played it in G but some people play it in cross A. I guess Lella Todd, kentucky player, played it in cross A. 

Clyde Davenport played a tune in G kind of similar. There are words to it, nothing too exciting. Who's been here since I've been gone? Old Aunt Jenny with her nightcap on. There was probably more at some point. Some folks have a crooked version of it, but this is how we play it here in Baltimore. Here we go. Thank you. Thank you for listening. 

You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudiocom, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day. 

I try to play jazz (Cluck Old Hen, Ed Weaver's version)

 

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller. Today I'll be bringing you a setting of the tune Cluck Old Hen by Ed Weaver's version from a jam in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. I call this episode I try to play jazz because I recently tried to play some jazz and then I thought it'd be fun to talk a little bit about jazz and give people a sense of how I look at it, how I think about it, how I practice it, how I try to play it. 

Of course I'm not a jazz violinist. I got roped into it because I got asked to play a Klezmer gig and I said, oh sure, I love Klezmer and I love playing and performing Klezmer. Then I found out I also had to play a jazz set, so that was exciting. 

The world of jazz has a, I would say, a fairly high bar for being able to join in with people who do it a lot. You're really expected to have a lot of knowledge to either know the tunes all the standard tunes from memory, even be able to just transpose them into another key, kind of on the spot. Or, if you don't know something, be able to read it off the page and translate what's written on the page into the style of swing or jazz. 

It's something that I can do with fiddle tunes look at the way they're notated on the page and translate them into a more stylistic version. But that requires a lot of practice and background, a lot of experience both in the style and to be a pretty experienced music reader and comfortable with that. And in addition to knowing or reading the head of the tune, the melody, you also are expected to play a solo over the changes. 

That's both exciting and a little bit nerve-wracking, especially if you don't do it very often. The chords you want to be familiar with for jazz, the basic triads that you get in fiddle music, but you're going to get a lot more sevenths. You have your minor and your major chords, but you also need to be very comfortable with the seventh, the major seventh, diminished and augmented chords or having, you know, the sixth or the 11th thrown in. 

I can get pretty far with that. I think there was one tune on the gig that was Antonio Carlos' Jobin tune and the chords were so complicated. I said I don't know if I can play over these changes. I can play the melody. I didn't know if I could take a solo on it. If it's a pretty simple tune and you know the tune really well and you're not that familiar with chords and how they work, you might be able to just fly by the seat of your pants and kind of pants the solo, fly by the seat of your pants and kind of pants the solo, riff off the melody or off what you're hearing from the folks playing the changes behind you. 

But I wouldn't count on being able to do that. If you're going to be playing a lot of jazz, you want to be able to read the chords off the page. Use that to help you play the solos. If I'm doing a really tricky transposition you know it's a tune, I know, but they're asking me to play it in some crazy E-flat minor or something because that's the key the singer needs then I may just go off the page and go by my ear because I can't calculate the transposition quickly enough to do that and make up a solo at the same time. 

But it's nice to be able to read on the page. It gives you the map, basically to know where you're going when you're improvising a jazz or swing solo. I'll give you a couple of suggestions. Of course, remember I'm not a professional in this area, but this is what I think about. If I get into this position, which I did recently I have to do my best to keep up with a band and try to sound like a swing violinist, even if that's not my usual gig.

I try to keep things really simple. I mean, when I say really simple, using one note like for a while, pretty simple rhythms, like for a while, pretty simple rhythms and then you can add some more rhythms to that note. Or you can use your simple rhythms and play a couple more notes, basically add a little bit of complexity as you're going through the form, but you never have to start out with a lot of fancy stuff. 

You can always start out with just one or two notes and a pretty simple rhythm. Or you can start off with the literal melody of the tune and start to riff over it as you go through the form. Making your own patterns is a suggestion I've gotten from players that I've played with that I've asked about this. Hey, can you give me tips for improvising solos, Just coming up with a little riff or a melody that has a few notes and when the chord changes, playing it again in the new chord, moving it around that way or moving it up and down in a scale. 

And you can always change it a little bit. A little bit of change in the rhythm, an extra note here or there, or you can just change the way you play it, the dynamic or the articulation or how you slide into the notes or out all of that. It's always good to leave space. Leave way more space than you think you need to. I never leave enough space when I'm soloing and you kind of want it to arc. 

If you're going to have a really loud part or really high part, you want that to be, oh, whatever. It's like three quarters of the way through the period in which you're soloing. Sometimes I can make that work for me and sometimes I can't. But when I practice jazz I've got my real book and sometimes I'll have an app that'll play chords. 

So you open it up, you know, find all of me and maybe if you're playing with a person who can play the chords for you or I'll put them on the you know iReal Pro Jazz app. Play the All of Me chords and slow them down, because that's what I need. Play the head through once, then I'll play, let the chords go through again and I'll just outline the chords. You know. Play 1, 3, 5, 3, 1, 3, 5, 7, and do each chord as it comes, and then I'll usually take a crack at doing a little soloing over. 

That's about it. Maybe I'll play the head at the end and practice putting in some variations, you know, jazzing it up a little bit, so to speak. That's how I practice jazz. You know, if you go on the internet and you Google how to practice jazz there's a lot of discussions on YouTube, on Reddit you can find ways. But that's it's a pretty basic little way to start out and you don't need much. You just need a little bit of sheet music. 

Get yourself a real book or a fake book, and it can be nice to pay whatever 10 or 20 bucks for the app that'll play you the chords. It'll make it a lot easier to hear the changes. 

Okay, our tune for today is not jazz. This is Cluck Old Hen, but you will not recognize it as the Cluck Old Hen we're mostly familiar with. You know Cluck Old Hen, cluck and Sing s Ain't a seen an egg since way last spring. I like that one. 

But this is Ed Weaver's Cluck Old Hen. The Fiddler's Companion book calls this Cluck Old Hen 6. So I guess there were five others considered more important into the Milliner R and Koken collection, the Bible, full-time music, and of course they had a CD that went with. That Just Tunes, but I guess this was how they played it out in the Shenandoah Valley. Cluck Old Hen. Ready. 

Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudiocom along with my books, courses for today's tune at fiddle studio. com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.

Consider the Mandolin (Shippensport)

 

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of the tune Shippensport from a jam in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to talk about the mandolin so not the fiddle, but there are a lot of similarities and if you're a fiddler or you're learning about fiddle, it's nice to know about the mandolin too, and we'll talk about why. that is.

A little bit of housekeeping first. Our new puppy, Silas, is getting used to the violin. He kind of likes music. He sometimes gets worried about cases. We were all laughing at him yesterday because he was barking at the banjo case, which I don't think was a commentary on my husband's banjo playing. But you never know, I don't think he knew what was in the case. Actually, the dog. 

I have been practicing for Clifftop. I will be at Clifftop. If you'll be there, please reach out and let me know. I'd love to meet up. It'll be my first time and I will know a few folks, but I'll be trying to find my bearings. Charley and I will be at Clifftop this year and I am going to enter the fiddle contest. Still need to pick out some tunes. 

For that I have been practicing the tune Sweet Milk and Peaches. It's a great version from Naramore and Smith. It's a tune I grew up playing many years ago. Actually, looking around for some other things from my repertoire, sometime between now and August I'll figure it out. I'm sure 

I wanted to say a thank you to Kentucky Small Batch Strings, which is a little company down in Kentucky that sent me some rosin and I really enjoyed using the rosin. I'm using their dark variety, so this isn't a paid endorsement, but they did send me some for free for me to kind of try out, and I have enjoyed using it. It's been a nice break from the cheap rosin I would stockpile for students way back when, and so I wanted to say yeah, thank you for that. It's the Colonel Marcy's Bourbon Barrel Rosin. I really appreciate that. Yeah, Ggreg sent me some and I have switched over to using it Works great. 

And the last thing is that I will have a course coming out this summer. I've been working on a course in kind of a fiddle class format. The course is called Fiddle for Kids, but can be used for all ages. Sometimes can be used for all ages. Sometimes kids like a format where maybe they have a little less initiative, or maybe this is just what kids are used to. Some people like to decide what they want to learn and then go squirrel around and find it, and some people want to just sit in a class or turn on a video and follow along and learn. 

That way I have different parts of my life when I enjoy being a little more spoon-fed or being a little bit more of a researcher. So this is a format where I'm teaching a variety of tunes and techniques and you can just kind of turn it on and experience it. And a fun thing about it is that I'm working with another player. It's a video course with two fiddles I'll be teaching, but a former student of mine who studied with me when she was just a little kid, now a professional fiddler, Rebekah Geller, will be playing along for some of it, and it's kind of fun to see the two fiddles playing together and I think it makes for a nice video course. 

So I'll let you know when that's out, but you'll be able to check it out later this summer for sale just as an individual course on my website for $50 or as part of my membership, which is just access to all of the courses that I have recorded and finished and put out through my website, fiddle Studio. 

Okay, moving on to the mandolin, I don't play the mandolin. Charley does. My husband and I've had a lot of students play the mandolin and learn the mandolin. The reason that I'm covering it is that it is tuned like a fiddle. It has G, d, a, e strings, just like a fiddle. So if you play the fiddle, you've got a little bit of a head start on the mandolin. It does have eight strings, so it has two of each. Probably most of y'all knew that already. It's fingered like a fiddle same fingering, but it's got frets. 

So if you have some experience playing frets you've played guitar or banjo that's going to be pretty intuitive. If you've never played an instrument with frets, it's a nice way to try it out because it'll be the same fingerings that you're used to on the fiddle. But it will feel a little different because your fingers are a little farther apart. You're aiming to push the string down, kind of right behind the fret, but there's a lot of wiggle room in there. It could be right on the fret, it could be halfway between, I mean, as long as the string is touching that fret and has a good connection there, that's going to set the note. It will sound at that note. So you don't have to get your finger in exactly the right place the way you do with fiddle. But you got to get used to having the frets in there on the fingerboard. So that's kind of how it works.

If you're just playing through a tune that you know on the fiddle, you can finger it. The same way on the mandolin and with the right hand you're picking it. The same way on the mandolin and with the right hand you're picking. So have your pick. You're going back and forth plucking the strings instead of bowing them, which is, you know, picking takes a little bit of work to get used to and to get really good at, but let's face it, it's easier than bowing. Bowing is pretty hard, bowing is pretty hard and I speak from someone who teaches it, so I don't think there's too much that's easy about a bow. Once in a while you get someone who's very intuitive with it, but generally it is challenging. So it's nice to use the pick and just pluck it. You get a nice sound right away. 

One thing I really like about the mandolin is that you can play chords on it like you would a guitar or ukulele and you're learning the chord shapes for fiddle. I've had students who went to the mandolin and they learned some basic chords. You know a shape or two for G and D and A and then they come back to the fiddle and all of a sudden it's much easier to learn back up to play double stop kind of back up, just shuffling along with a tune, and it's also easier to improvise because you've got some shapes in your hands. You know a little bit closer to what that chord or what that scale, that group of notes feels like and you've had some experience changing chords within a tune. So hopefully you're hearing the changes is what they're called. 

People will call the harmonic shape of a tune, the changes or the chords, and if you only ever play melody you might not be aware of the harmonic shape or you might not have a sense of when the chords change, where the changes are in the tune. And learning something like the mandolin and just following along with the guitar player or looking at a tune in the book at where the chords change and playing the chords along with that, is going to give you a whole different sense of the music and of the tunes and you'll start to get into that rhythm backup mode. 

So that's what's nice about playing chords on the mandolin is you get a chance to play rhythm if you don't already play guitar, piano, something like that. And they call it rhythm because even though you're doing, you're making the shape of the chord and so you're providing some harmonic accompaniment to the tune. Just as important, or possibly more important, since we often call it rhythm, is that you're strumming in a rhythm and that rhythm is providing the rhythm for the dancing, for the tune, for the listener, for the players. 

Really good rhythm with really good time is so fun to listen to and play to. The older I get and the more I hopefully grow as a musician, the more I really love to play with players who are super steady and just rocking on that rhythm, especially if you have a couple like mandolin and guitar, guitar and banjo, uke, something like that. Love to hear a couple of rhythm players together when they're really locked up and synced in. I think a great thing about mandolin is just that with one instrument you can do both right. You can play the tune if you know the tune. 

If you get tired of playing the tune or you don't know it, you can play rhythm. So you get to practice both sides of it, whereas with fiddle it's a little less common to be playing back up, or if you're playing something like guitar it's a little less common to play the melody. But mandolin, I think, really goes back and forth very easily, very naturally. If you want to look around for an inexpensive model that'll have a nice sound, you can check out the Kentucky KM-150 or the Eastman 305. I think we have an Eastman. 

I think we've had a Kentucky and an Eastman. Different mandolins have come in and out of our lives over the course of the time I've been with Charley. Anyway, check out the mandolin if you play the fiddle or if you just want to check out the mandolin. 

Our tune today is Shippensport. This is a fun tune. It's a tune out of Kentucky G major. There'll be a number of G major tunes coming up in the next few episodes. Pulled from a jam where we were playing in G, sometimes played with two parts, sometimes played with three parts, sometimes played with three parts. Shippensport is a town in Kentucky, in the northeast part of the state 

Now it's sort of part of Louisville Near the Portland Canal. There used to be falls as part of the Ohio River at that location, and so they would have to take things off the ships and move them to the other side of the falls and then get them back on other boats and send them on their way. So there was a town that grew up around the falls, Shipping Port that kind of catered to the traffic between the upper and the lower Ohio River. It's not really there anymore, but we play this tune generally called Shippensport. The two-part version is played by Doc Roberts and John Masters, and that's what we've got today. We've got the two-part version of Shippensport.