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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 Winder Slide by Joe LaRose from a session at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about repeats and fiddle tunes. I've been thinking a lot about repeats. And I did post a question about it. And the, what was it, the Facebook Fiddler's Association set off quite a discussion. So people thought it was a dumb question. That's okay. I'll take it.
Other people may be misinterpreted the question was kind of why are there repeats and fiddle tunes. So some people were just thinking about the music printing aspect, you know, and say, well, it's just a save ink. Which wasn't my question. I was thinking about why is there so much repeated music in traditional dance music?
So I'll talk a little bit about the discussion and the sort of philosophical questions I had around repeats. And then we'll just do some nitty gritty ins and outs of repeats. After that, you know, everybody kind of said, it's for the dancers, you know, matches the dance. But in my mind, there's a bit of a chicken and egg question like, are the dancers good at dancing to music that repeats because we play so much for them?
Or are we playing so much music that repeats, because it helps the dancer, you know, just trying to figure out because the dance is 32 bars, so people could say, well, you have to repeat, so it fits the dance. But of course 32 bars of any music can be danced to and there were people who posted and said, Oh, I used to play this, or I used to play that. I think Donna Herbert said the different Beatles tunes or songs in the ad, she would play the the theme from all things considered.
So you can take 32 bars, if anything, and kind of dance a 32 bar dance to it, and it will, quote, unquote, fit. But we don't do that very much. I mean, it's very seldom, the repeated a part and repeated b part are so prevailing, and the more I thought about it was like, there must be something about hearing that music again, that makes it really, really comfortable for people to dance to for people to listen to and hear. If you think about songs having a chorus that comes back or Well, somebody wrote in the discussion online. Why does the first line of the blues repeat? Okay, well, yeah, it's tradition. That's the way they do it. It's part of the form.
I just wanted to question it. I don't know, maybe I was being devil's advocate. Sometimes in my family, we just like to ask the question, Well, why is that? And you know, why is that? Why is that? In fiddle tunes, it is just assumed that there's an a part and a B part that repeats. So that's not to say all tunes are like that. If it's not like that, someone will generally explain that if they don't explain anything about the form, that's the form A, B, B, if they say, Well, it's, you know, it's only one B part. And then there's a c part or these parts are short, or there's no repeats, for some reason, they have to explain why that's different. Because the standard form is the AABB form.
And even within an A part before you even repeat the part, there's usually two little sections of the same melody, you know, sounds like you know, you asking a question, getting an answer, then you ask the same question again, or melody repeats, even just within the part, you get the different answer. Yeah, so maybe it's for the dancers.
I don't feel completely settled on my understanding of why repeats are so central to dance music. But to shift gears a little bit, a repeat sign on the page is written as there's a double bar, and two dots. So that means repeat, you play twice, you know, with kids, I'm always just like two dots there, play twice. These days, you'll often see it written out with first and second endings. So there'll be a little ending marked, first ending, and then the repeat that turns you back to the beginning. And then you sort of skip over the first ending and play that different ending the second time.
And this just to touch on these endings a little bit. When you're doing a complicated dance on the floor, or contra dance, there's a thing called end effects. And, you know, with a double progression dance or something, sometimes you get to the end of the line, and people are trying to kind of start the dance over from a different perspective, and they get confused. You have to, you have to help them understand how to switch directions and start over from a different way.
First endings and second endings are, are kind of doing that, in older tunes, the way they're written out, often they don't put in those, those little end effects. So, a lot of times a second ending will be the little bridge music that takes you to the B part, if you're a part was download your B parts up high, you're probably not going to just the second time when you repeat the A part ended down low, and then suddenly jump up high for the B part, it's probably gonna be a few notes that kind of take you up there.
If you look at old O'Neill's and stuff, they may they may not have written that out, people just assumed it or they, you know, they had their own version of it, these days will often write it out as a first and second ending. And same thing with the B part where the first time you want the B part, it may be a little little chunk of music that gets you back into the B part for the repeat for the second time, it might be something more sort of finishing sounding or even that would send you back to the A part, if that makes sense.
Now Becky Tracy had a name for that she called it the glue that holds the parts together that there might be a little different piece of glue between the the broader sections, you have to learn the different bits of glue.
So you may have known this was coming. I am a fiddle teacher. So, uh, just a public service announcement at the end here. You got to do the repeats, folks, this is mostly for beginners, if you've been playing the fiddle a long time. And I said to you, oh, fiddle tune is really long, you might laugh at me, you know, it's a minute, if you play it slowly, it's 40 seconds. If you play it up to speed, it's not really long.
But for a beginner, a fiddle tune can feel very long. And you see it in their body, you see it in their face, I see it when I teach them. And then the thought of doing all the repeats. The kids gets complain about it. The adults do sometimes, but you can't skip them. No, you can never skip the repeats. I may not know definitively why they're there. But they are part of the tune, for sure. And you're not playing the tune correctly if you're not doing the repeats.
So you will never hear a professional fiddle player, play a fiddle tune and just not do a repeat. That will be crazy. You won't hear that. If you're a beginner and it just feels really long, impossibly long to do the repeats. Just use that to build your endurance, you can do it. Do the repeats, get your endurance up. If you're having trouble playing it through with the repeats, play it twice. Once you played twice if you're only playing it once with repeats, it'll, it'll feel easier and pay attention to the kind of end effects first and second endings the glue that goes between the repeated sections. They're all about repeats.
Our tuned today is Winder Slide. This is a composed old time tune by Joe LaRose, a musician from Kent, Ohio. He wrote this tune, what's the date? I think around 1980 composed kind of recorded two different recordings of the tune. And they went in two different directions. So the first version that Joe wrote is played by Bruce Molsky. So if you look up Bruce Molsky and Winder Slide, you can kind of hear that version, I guess.
When he wrote it, he only had the A part. And that's how Bruce recorded it. And he liked that. The way Bruce played it a lot. But later, he wrote a b part. So he kind of developed the two part version later. And that version got recorded on Rayna Gellert's album Ways of the World. She said she learned it from Bill Dollof. So what LaRose said was the he kind of likes the two part version better, but he likes the way Bruce Molsky he didn't complain about Bruce Molsky recording the first version, but he likes the way Rayna does it too, with the two parts.
So a lot of people play it the way Rayna played it with the two parts just to note that it originally only had one so this is how we play it here in Baltimore. Yeah.
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