Fiddle Studio: Going to Fiddle Hell (La Galop de Lac St Charles)

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Welcome to the Fiddle 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 La Galope de lac St Charles, from a workshop with Becky Tracy at Fiddle Hell.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about a fiddle conference I went to in Westford, Massachusetts this past weekend, although you'll be hearing this in December. The name of the fiddle conference is a little awkward. Probably not for most people, but I'm a teacher. And teachers don't really say the word hell. It's not something you can say in a classroom. I will mostly be calling it a fiddle conference, but it is a fiddle conference called Fiddle Hell.

I was not on staff and they don't pay me to promote it, but I loved it. And so I'm going to tell you all the things I loved about it. There are a lot of fiddle conventions. If you didn't know this, a lot of them are genre specific, so just bluegrass fiddling or just Swedish fiddling.

This particular fiddle conference has a ton of genres. I'll give you the incomplete list. In alphabetical order bluegrass, blues, Cajun, Cape Breton, country, French Canadian, Irish, jazz, klezmer, Latin, New England, old time, pop rock, Scandinavian, Scottish, swing, Texas, Western swing. They have great players who come who specialize in that particular genre.

It is a very unique opportunity to both hear and learn from players from a lot of different backgrounds and different genres. And that was one thing that I loved about it. Most of the classes are fiddle oriented. There were some classes for other members of the classical string family like cello. There were some classes for other members of what I would consider the folk music string family like guitar, mandolin, Banjo.

Fiddle was the overwhelming instrument and focus, there were close to 500 people, they took over a whole hotel. I don't know what the hotel employees thought of all this. There were areas in the hallway where you could jam. And I think people jammed all night. I did not jam all night. There's basically fiddling going on 24/7 for four days and three nights.

The learning sessions are open to anyone, they are given a level. But if it's not your level, you are not barred from entry. That's just the level that the class is being taught at. And there's always several sessions to choose from just for example, at 10am. On Saturday, there were seventeen different workshops going on. Everything from working on technique, workshops, learning tunes, concerts, where you could go and listen jams that were organized jams that were just popping up a lot of different things to choose from.

In between the sessions, there's generally half an hour and there's a lot of jams that go on in between so you can finish up a session and pop into a jam and play a few tunes, head to another session or decide to skip the next one if your jam is going really well. It did make it hard for me to stop playing.It was hard to remember to, like, eat it fiddle hell.

There were a ton of great teachers and players there. A highlight for me was definitely learning from Becky Tracy, who plays New England, the style that I grew up with. And I knew she was a great player. But the last time I've learned from her was many years ago when I was in college. I was very impressed with her teaching. If you have the opportunity to take a lesson or workshop from Becky Tracy. I would sign up for that first.

I also had a great time learning from the French Canadian fiddler Eric Favreau. It's really hard to choose because everyone else was so great to I mean, doing an Irish session with Kevin Burke. That was amazing. Fiddle Hell was great, I will be pulling tunes all month from it.

Our tune today, and I don't speak French, so I'm doing the best that I can. La Galope de lac St Charles, it's a three part reel. Becky Tracy taught this. It's a Quebec tune so French Canadian, and she pulled it from the playing of Joe Bouchard, or Jos Bouchard. He was a fiddler born in 1905. He began fiddling around the age of eight and he had a day job he worked on the CNR railroad in his 30s he started recording so there are recordings of him and if you go on YouTube, and you look up Bouchard and la Galope, you can find him playing this tune. Pretty similar to how Becky Tracy learned it from that and taught it to us in the workshop.

It is at least the A part is pretty similar to a US tune from south of the border called Leventine's barrel. Different key but you could definitely see the tune outline was the same we're going to do this this version from Bouchard. Charlie and I are going to play it here you're ready?

Thanks for listening, you can head over to fiddlestudio.com to find sheet music for this tune and more information about becoming a member of Fiddle Studio. I'll be back next time with another tune for you have a wonderful day.