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 Jaybird from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello everyone, I hope you are well. We have a fun topic. Today. We're going to be talking about instrument horror stories. A lot of these are from the Facebook Fiddlers Association. Oh my gosh. I posted and they delivered.
Reading through the comments, my children came in to see what my husband and I were yelling about, because there were so many comments that made us just shout oh no. So this episode might need a little trigger warning. If the ideas of fiddles and bows, crunching and cracking is going to send you into a tailspin, maybe skip to the next episode.
Anyway, I think there's some pretty funny stories. I'll tell you mine first. When I was little, my dad and I would argue and this never happened but if I fell down the stairs, should I protect myself or should I protect the instrument? You know, fall on me or fall on the violin.
And we would joke about it. And I would say well, I should fall on the violin because I can always get a new violin. And he said no, protect the violin because you'll heal and the violin won't. Luckily, my fiddlers were all safe up until I was an adult.
But as a teenager I did run down the stairs in our house and there was a doorway there and my bow just stuck between the door and the door jam and tips snapped right off. And that was a nice bow I was. I was already playing professionally at that point. Oh my, my parents were not impressed by this. They said I had to buy my own bow.
So we went down to Tom Hosmer. Tom Hosmer, great fiddler and has a violin shop in the Syracuse area, has for many years, because he sold me all my fiddles from when I was three and he's still there. He was so nice. I looked at bows and I picked out the one that I wanted. I didn't have enough money to buy it, but I had a summer job at that point.
So I said can you give me a loaner bow and then I'll save my money for my summer job and I'll come back and buy this bow? And he said oh, meg, just take the bow and bring the money back when you have it. That was great. So I did get to practice that summer with a decent bow and worked all summer and then gave all the money to Tom for the bow.
But I was more careful with my instruments. After that lesson learned, I did have my instruments stolen out of my car. That was very sad when that happened. Hopefully that violin and bow ended up with someone who could use them because they were nice. That was my college violin.
My violin now the Rimmer Owen violin had a tiny crack for a long time. That was not causing any harm at all. I was just nursing it along, keeping it humid in the winter, and I bumped my violin at a gig I was sitting. It just slipped through my fingers and kind of crashed against the stage and the crack spread all the way up the front of the violin. It was horrifying.
Still had to play the rest of the gig and then I took it to Michael Weller in Alexandria. He fixed it up. But oh my goodness. So let's talk about some of these stories from Facebook. There were a lot of car stories. I was surprised at the number of car stories.
So I knew, when I was a teenager, a bass player who had a van and they had, like, not shut the door all the way the bass had fallen out of the back of their van into the road and gotten hit by a car. There were at least two guys on Facebook who had run over guitars with their cars. How does this happen?
Someone else described getting a headache. They had their fiddle in their car without a case. They put it on the seat behind them and then later they had this headache and they just leaned their seat back to take a nap and crushed the fiddle. Wow, that must have been a moment and already had a headache. Wow.
A couple of people talked about fiddles in hot cars, so the glue melting or the especially the neck falling off. So maybe that's the glue that goes first, because there were a lot of different humidity neck falling off stories. You always think about keeping your fiddle humid enough during like dry winter months, but apparently if it gets too humid the neck can fall off.
So somebody talked about it happening at a hurricane or in a hot car or an outdoor like summer jam session. Yeah, this girl lost her fiddle at the airport. That's kind of everyone's nightmare. I've left my fiddle at restaurants and bars. Always got it back, you know. I mean they say Yo-yo Ma left St rad in a cab, got it back. Most people are pretty good natured trying to help you get your instrument back.
I did love the stories from mishaps from the middle of gigs. I felt a little bad for the girls that she almost threw up all over her fiddle, but a lot of bow flying incidents. So someone described that they had some weakness in their hand and that their bow would fly out. But a lot of other people said that they had just, you know, accidentally thrown their bow. You know playing vigorously. I guess it happens. I've never thrown my bow while playing.
There's other things that can go wrong. Yeah, I saw about a bridge breaking in half and the whole string quartet kind of erupted and the people jerked because it made a really loud sound and then there was like stands falling over and music flying. That sounds like quite an experience. I'll give you my two favorite stories here.
This guy said that he had his fiddle on stage along with his guitar, his Martin D 28. I don't know what that means, but I assume that it means something if you put that in there. He says a girl who had been drinking. She fell onto the stage hitting the fiddle stand, sending it over into the dance floor. So the fiddle went flying. It landed upside down, cracked open the top and while the fiddle was in the air, the stand fell down onto the guitar and punched a hole in the upper. Bout in the rosewood. Yeah, a moment of silence for this guy. What a terrible gig.
Oh yeah yeah. There were several sitting and stepping on fiddle stories. You gotta keep the case closed, folks. These were all open case stories. Okay, here's my last one. I'm just going to read it to you. "My newly restored vintage fiddle was resting loosely in a soft case when a gust of wind swept the case and fiddle overboard. This was on a sunset cruise on a wind-powered sailing ship with a historic band entertaining the passengers. After 20 minutes and running over the fiddle several times, we picked it up. The glue had dissolved, leaving it in pieces."
Mmm, yeah, this was inspiring me never to take my fiddle on a boat for any reason. Oh, no gig is worth that much. Ah well, take a deep breath. After those, I think we're all resolved to take good care of our instruments.
Now Our tune for today is Jaybird. This is a tune from the Baltimore Old Time Jam. Hey, I am a sponsor of the Baltimore Old Time Jam. You can go online and find out more about it. It's at baltimoreoldtimefest.com. The old time scene around here is supported by Ken Kolodner and his son, Brad Kolodner, and they do a lot of events and they're all great.
There's a square dance, a jam, there's a festival in April and I wanted to get the word out for my business Fiddle Studio, where I have my courses and my books and I interact with students through that site. I was looking for local places to advertise that weren't just giving more money to Google, because who needs to do that?
Yeah, so I'm sponsoring the Old Time Jam and if you're coming through Baltimore you should definitely check it out. A big thank you to Brad and Ken for doing that jam, because I get so many tunes for the pod from them, including this one, Jaybird, also called March to the Fife or kind of Pennsylvania Fifers. Yeah, there's a few different fifing names for it, considered kind of a revival tune.
Also has been played a lot since the 1960s, early 70s by some of the fiddlers and banjo players in that time frame. So, like Art Rosenbaum, John Burke, Joel Schimberg, it was collected from Southwestern Pennsylvania. Yeah, we're looking, mountain country played on the fiddle and the fife, and that would have been same time, mid-20th century.
It was played both as a march and as a reel. We kind of do it as a march at the jam. Some of it sounds like Skip to my Lou. We play the high part first and then we play the low part second. If you want to hear it that way, there is a recording on Slippery Hill of John Summers playing it in 1970, basically the same way. We do it at the Baltimore Old Time Jam.
The Fiddle tune archive had the high part second, so somebody must play it that way. This is Jaybird. Yeah, nice D tune. Here we go you.
Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.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.
No comments:
Post a Comment