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 Five Miles of Ellum Wood from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about the old classic question, what is the difference between a violin and a fiddle? I have been asked this question many times. I did Google it.
Which of course, you know, when you start typing, they give you the popular questions. And I'm sort of fascinated to see that. A lot of what is the difference? Questions are on scientific topics like right up there. What is the difference between weather and climate? mass and weight? speed and velocity? I kids like that. Gross pay and net pay. Yeah. There's a bunch of them.
But what is the difference between a violin and a fiddle? Dictionary.com says the words fiddle and violin are two names for the same stringed instrument. Fiddle is just an informal way of referring to the violin. In the context of classical music, it's typically called the violin in a bluegrass band, it's more likely to be called a fiddle. It was from dictionary.com.
So there you go. Our tune for today... No, that was a joke. Just kidding. We'll talk about it more. I don't know what else I have to say. I get asked this question, mostly by people who don't play music. And I think it's made me it's just an easy way to make conversation after I've brought up fiddling or they've asked me, you know, what do I do? And I say, Well, I'm a fiddle teacher, they're not sure what I mean, or what that is. So they'll, they'll say, Well, what's the difference between violin and fiddle?
Some people when they're asked this make a joke. We'll get to that in a minute. Have got one of the jokes. A go to, I usually say something like, they're same names for the same instrument. It's just a different kind of music. So Fiddling is a kind of music when you play that you call it a fiddle. Variations on that is how I usually answer the question.
I did look into it a little bit kind of the etymology of this word. Or some theories that fiddle came from roots that were dramatic and violin came from other words from the Romance languages. So they may have just been different names for the same type of instrument, but from different areas. In Europe, there's Icelandic words, Old English words that seem to be related.
There's a Latin word fidula, which was, I guess an early word for violin? In medieval times, I guess fiddle referred to a predecessor of a violin. Actually, I've played that instrument. Yeah, funny story. I played in a medieval band, cover band, I don't know, for a minute. And I was playing this sort of early medieval violin. It was crazy.
It seems that as soon as people started using violin, they would use fiddle kind of more colloquially, or it right away meant something. Something kind of off-key, off-color. So all of the colloquial uses of the word like fiddle sticks or fiddle DD or Fiddle Faddle saying something was ridiculous. So that fiddle fiddling was ridiculous. I don't know. I wouldn't say that. These days. It's funny. Fiddler's will call it a violin or fiddle. Most violin players call it a violin.
Although then you have like Itzhak Perlman calls it a fiddle, but it is maybe a little rude to just call it a fiddle in the classical world. Is that rude? I wouldn't do it if I was talking to someone about their instrument. And they were a classical player. And I didn't know that if they played any folk music or traditional music. I would call their instrument a violin. I wouldn't call it a fiddle. There you go.
Oh, wait, one more thing. So here's the joke. What's the difference between a violin and a fiddle? The violin has strings and the fiddle has strangs. Oh, wait, did I say them differently enough? We've got my northern accent, strings and strangs was well, we'll see if we include that.
Our tune for today is five miles of Ellum Wood. This is an interesting tune, and I'm so glad that they played it at the jam and that I pulled it for this podcast. It comes from a CD by Bruce Greene. And the CD is actually called Five Miles of Ellum Wood. I think you can still get it Old Time Kentucky Fiddle Solos.
So I don't, I don't personally have this CD. I guess it has liner notes. And I looked everywhere for these liner notes. I should have hit up some actually local players to see if anyone had the physical CD with the liner notes. Because I'm told that they're awesome. And that it is completely worth buying the CD from Bruce Green's website, old time Kentucky fiddle solos, a lot of really interesting tunes. You can find it online.
I guess it's also maybe in a book called Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern. But the CD anyway is 22 fiddle solos that Bruce learned to play from some of the last living fiddler's of Kentucky, music that was passed down from the 1800s when the playing of unaccompanied fiddle tunes was still pretty common. I saw that description and it made me think that gets mostly unaccompanied. I listened to the version that he played and I thought it was amazing. I loved his playing. I loved the version. I am not going to really do it justice now, but we're certainly going to do our best. So this is Five Miles of Ellum Wood, here we go.
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