Jam drama (Walking in My Sleep)

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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 Walking in My Sleep from a Square Dance at the Mobtown Ballroom in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about jam drama. It's a little hard to say Jam drama. What do I mean by that? It's come up a few times recently. People have been talking to me about experiences they had at jams or sessions and I think it often boils down to kind of who's in the club and who's out of the club and how you feel when you're jamming with people. Do you feel like you're part of it or do you feel like you're on the outside? It's a very human thing to want to be part of the tribe, so I don't think we can quite escape from the desire to feel accepted and part of the group in a jam. 

How does this all work? I was speaking to a woman at a jam that I was at at a party at someone's house and she's a little older than I am, and she said she often feels a little self-conscious at jams because she feels like she's older than some of the folks jamming and she worries that they'll be thinking something like, oh that old lady, she can't keep up. 

I told her that I often feel self-conscious at jams, especially when I was younger, because I thought that the older folks at the jam, who had been around a long time and knew a million tunes, would think oh, that kid doesn't know what she's doing. 

So I guess the lesson there is that everybody is thinking about if they belong and if they're part of the group. How do you get to the place where you feel accepted, you feel part of a jam. Some folks are pretty outgoing and they'll come to session a few times, introduce themselves, get to know everyone, make conversation. Other people are shy, they consider themselves introverts. But by showing up repeatedly to the same kinds of events you will become a known entity. 

If you see a tight group of musicians at a camp, at Clifftop, at Fiddle Hell, at a festival, they all seem to know each other and they all seem to know the same tunes and you think, oh, I wish that I had that. I think by repeatedly showing up and getting to know people and getting to play with people you will develop it over time those are just folks that have played together a lot because they keep running into each other and making plans to play and over time they develop and the more you play with people, the more enjoyable it is to play with them, because you all start to learn the same tunes. You get a feel for how to play together. It's fun To get a crew. You have to keep showing up really is what I'm saying. 

Why do you want to be known? Why do you not want to be an unknown musician? Well, people can be adverse to unknown musicians. You just don't know what you're going to get. I always have a lot of stories from martial arts. So when I was in a Muay Thai gym, for every 10 people who would kind of come in and try the gym, five of them might be complete beginners and totally reasonable people and another four of them might have some experience but follow along with class, do a great job, have a good attitude. But there was usually one guy. 

Every now and then we'd have someone come in. I said guy, it was usually a guy, who had done martial arts before and was just doing very unexpected things, kind of off the rocker, like asking to fight people being really aggressive. Someone like brought their trainer in who was sort of arguing with the teacher during class, or just like coming to class but ignoring the class and being off, doing like push-ups and pull-ups in the corner. Strange behavior. 

So you get someone unknown. You just don't know if they're going to be one of those nine reasonable people or if they're going to be that the 10th guy. So people will be more interested in jamming with you once they know you a little, they get a feel for you. 

I read some stories from folks on Facebook complaining about being told off in jams for doing something that somebody considered to be the wrong thing. I don't know, using music, playing the wrong instrument or the wrong tune. I mean, maybe this person was being rude, but certainly if you're telling someone off in a jam, you are also being rude. 

I think the goal here is for everyone to assume that everyone is doing their best. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who would wake up and say tonight I'm going to go to a jam and ruin it. I'm going to play way too fast or way too slow or not in this style and I'm just going to ruin their jam. Yeah, they're not trying to do anything. 

It's like when a toddler spills their milk and makes a big mess they weren't trying to well, usually they weren't trying to make a big mess. So you just have to remind yourself they're trying their best and if they're doing something that's kind of insensitive, it's not necessarily going to help to tell them off. You want everyone around you as much as possible, when you're collaborating musically, to be sensitive to what's going on and also flexible. 

So when you're sensitive, you're keeping track of what's happening with other people, you're trying to fit yourself into what they're doing, and then being flexible is also just accepting oh, this isn't happening the way I expected it to, but that's okay, we can roll with it. Try not to take things too personally. 

It does come up sometime about social media. It didn't used to be so much of an issue. I know it's a big thing with, like, birthday parties. You know people say, well, you don't invite your whole Facebook, all your friends, to a birthday parties, but then you post your party and so some of your friends look on Facebook and they're like, oh, why wasn't I invited? 

Well, this happens with musicians, with jams and parties, and people have feelings about it. It's pretty tricky in the music business because in order to make money as a musician, you kind of need to constantly remind people that you're there to hire to play music, or to hire to teach a lesson or to buy some of your merch, and so a lot of musicians, just as part of their business, will post about the different musical events they do. 

I do this, too as a way to kind of drum up enough work for the profession. It's not really a high paying profession. So if you're having feelings about people posting on social media, I would maybe try to find some things to go to. There's some events and parties that are closed and you need an invitation, but there's a lot of stuff that's open concerts you can go to, and festivals and jams at bars and if you're looking at somebody else's posting and wishing that you could do something like that, I think you can try to create that for yourself. 

Like I said before, showing up becoming a known entity I mean really live music is becoming less common and I try to remind myself to view it as a gift. Now people don't play music in person as much as they did, so just the opportunity to be with other people who want to leave their houses, put their phones down, get out their instruments and play music with you isn't, some ways, a luxury? It's a gift and I try to treat it as such. Try to remember not everybody gets to do this. 

Our tune for today is Walking in My Sleep. This is a tune that I pulled from the Baltimore Square Dance. Baltimore has a really great square dance. It's run by Brad Kolodner, a great fiddler and banjo player. I think they're coming up next month August 2023, on their 10th anniversary square dance. It happens about once a month and this one was at the MobTown Ballroom in Baltimore. 

Walking in my Sleep is an Old-Time reel Breakdown, a tune from the mountains. We've got Western North Carolina and Southwest Virginia and East Kentucky played in those areas. It's in G major. Yeah, they called it a Blue Ridge area standard In Surrey County, north Carolina. It was in the repertoire of Otis Burris, a fiddler down there, and also played by Esker Hutchings in Dobson, North Carolina. 

Oh, and the other place I saw it was Fiddler Glenn Smith played the tune at the 1935 Galax Fiddlers Convention. I am not sure how do you say Galax. I looked at this Fiddler's Convention. First of all. I was trying to see where it said what this one guy played and I couldn't find that Glenn Smith. We'll just have to assume he played this tune. But they have been having a fiddler's convention in Galax apparently since 1935. 

That was the first year and some members of the Moose Lodge, number 733, needed to raise some funds. So the way they did that was by promoting a fiddling competition and publicizing it. They put it in the newspaper, lots of people came, wanted to play all different instruments and fiddle and compete on them. They had conventions in their lodge, I guess, and then they moved outside to Felts Park and it's been held there pretty much every year, one year canceled due to World War II and the other year it was canceled was in 2020 because of the pandemic, but they're still having that. It's probably coming up. I think it's in August every year. 

Here's the tune, anyway, Walking in My Sleep.