Find my podcast here on Apple music or here on Spotify!
Welcome to the little studio podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Big Scioty from an old time jam at the R House in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about why I haven't been booking contra dances. This topic has been on my mind because I just booked a gig a contra dance recently after saying no for many months to playing for contra dances. I really haven't played more than I think one dance in person since the pandemic started to wane and dancing came back in person.
Some of the background behind this, well, I grew up playing for contra dances and I started pretty young I was 12 years old. I never really knew anything different. A contra dance is a gig that is three hours long, and you're playing in 10 to 12 minute chunks, just straight fiddle tunes for 10 minutes. So a fiddle tune takes about 40 seconds to play through, at you know, full speed. So you can calculate how many times you're playing in a row without stopping.
You don't actually even have any control over when you end because the dance leader, the caller will tell you when they want you to stop. So you're playing, playing, playing, and then there's a little break when they teach the next dance, and you're right back into it. And there would be a break in the middle of the night. But it was a lot of playing for not a lot of money. I mean, gosh, back in the 90s we'd get paid 30 or $40. I didn't know any different, you know, I was a teenager, I just figured that's what a gig was and, and that's what you got paid.
I do remember even then that I would get hand cramps. By the end of the night, you know, my first finger on my left hand would cramp. And I'd be panicking a little bit trying to change the tune so I wasn't playing it with my one or quick pick a march to play. If we were stuck playing a really difficult tune at the end of the night, many more times than we thought we were going to because the caller was letting the dance run long, it could be really painful.
Actually, I think that my perspective on this really changed during the lockdown in the pandemic, the online dances that people organized were generally about 60 to 90 minutes. And the callers really just wanted you to play the tune six times through, and that's it. So we got used to a very new reality instead of three hours, it was just one hour. And instead of having to play for 10 minutes, was really only like three minutes. That was nice. It was easy. I really enjoyed that actually.
Coming back to playing in person to three hour gigs that ended 10:30 or even 11 o'clock, Glen Echo used to end at 1130, oh, my goodness. The crowds are much smaller. So what that means, actually for the band is that the breaks are even shorter. Really short breaks, because it doesn't take very long to teach a small crowd a dance. So I tried playing a dance. And it was it was hard.
I went ahead and and I talked to some fiddlers about it this summer when I had a chance to and I asked them what they thought. I said, hey, what do you think about how much work it is to you know, play lead fiddle at a contra dance for, kind of, what the community can pay right now. And you know, they had some different kinds of thoughts about it.
We all sort of agreed that you really need another reason to be doing it. It's not something that makes sense just as a gig to pay the bills. Unfortunately. You know, if you're practicing for an album, and you book a bunch of gigs, that's a way to just play with your band and tighten things up for your album. Or maybe you have a friend and you don't get to play with him very much. So you book a gig and it's kind of social playing and also get paid a little bit for it. But it's hard to make it make sense if there's not another reason, I'll say as a parent, particularly when you're looking at school nights and babysitting, stuff like that.
I started getting asked to play dances and I had been saying no. I really wanted, well, I really wanted a two hour dance that ended at 10. I was complaining, I wanted a two dance that ends at 10. But the truth is that I really miss playing with my dad. We haven't played a dance together since the pandemic and so I did finally go ahead and book a dance going to be playing on November 30 in Baltimore and we are looking forward to that. Moving on from my dance woes.
Our tune today is a setting of Big Scioty from this old-time jam at the R house in the Remington neighborhood of Baltimore. This is a reel in G major. We are still in G. We'll be staying in G a little while.
Big Scioty is a really famous tune, but I couldn't remember the name of it. There's no tune pal, no app for identifying old time tunes. So I actually called Brad Kolodner. Brad Kolodner is a wonderful banjo player, multi instrumentalist who leads the old time sessions in Baltimore with his father, Ken Kolodner, who is a famous hammered dulcimer and fiddle player. And I called up Brad and I was singing him the tune. And he was like, oh, that's Big Scioty. You know, you always need a friend to call if you need to know the name of a tune, very helpful.
The setting of this tune is partially from the playing of Burl Hammonds, who was a West Virginia fiddler out of Pocahontas County. You can hear him play it at Slippery hill, the website that I cited last week. Burl plays it crooked, meaning it's not a clean 32 bar tune with an eight bar A part that repeats and then eight bar B part that repeats. He was repeating certain phrases to make it not fit in those 32 bars.
I don't play it crooked, so as a dance musician, I tend to play tunes mostly straight, not crooked because I want them to be able to fit dances. The name Big Scioty comes from Sciota or Scioto River which runs through Ohio and empties into the Ohio River.
We're gonna play it here are you ready?
Hey, thanks so much for listening. You can head over to fiddle studio.com for the sheet music to this and all of the tunes I teach. I'll be back next time with another tune for you have a wonderful day.
No comments:
Post a Comment