Harmonies in Fiddle Tunes (Boys Them Buzzards are Flying)

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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 Boys Them Buzzards Are Flying by Gary Harrison from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. We're going to talk today about harmonies in fiddle tunes. Harmonies sound so good. A good harmony, which is basically a line that matches the shape of a melody but generally sticks to the notes that are in the chords or in the scale that's happening right then, can really really add to a fiddle tune. 

Of course, you need two players usually to play harmonies, so we don't always get to practice them as much as some of the other parts of fiddling, but they are so fun to have as a tool to collaborate. People do worry a little bit about the rules for when you harmonize and when you can't harmonize. We'll get to that. Harmony is a little bit like a spice. You know, in cooking it's rarely completely unwelcome. You don't want all your food to be bland, but you have to know when to use it. Use it in reasonable doses. To prepare for this, I did ask people for their take on harmonies. Which group was that? It was the Fiddle Players group in Facebook. If you know of that group, it's pretty big group. They have a lot of great players on there who will get in touch with you, answer questions or comment on topics. And I was asking about different genres in harmonizing. You know I'm a New England fiddler and harmony is pretty welcome in New England fiddling and in contra dances. 

At a dance you don't always play harmony first. Yeah, you want to let people hear the melody, get used to the melody. If they're at a live dance they're trying to do a dance to the melody. Depending on the dancer, they may be matching up what they're doing with the music. So you don't necessarily want to make the music overly complicated while they're learning the dance. If you're jamming or you're just playing together with other people and someone's trying to pick up the tune, well harmonizing can make that harder. So definitely at a jam you always want to save harmony for when everyone seems like they've got to handle on the tune. That's just being polite. Harmonies add energy. So another reason to save it for maybe later in the song or in the set of dance tunes, because once you start adding harmonies the energy really ramps up and then if you take them away now, the energy's going back down. So it's a good thing to do later at the end. For the last big hurrah. 

Most genres and this was kind of backed up in the discussion on my Facebook post most genres welcome harmonies in those ways, not in ways that confuse players or confuse dancers, but in that use spices carefully and in reasonable doses ways. I'll just name some. Certainly, in Scottish Cape Breton, New England, where I come from, even French Canadian, you find it ubiquitous. In Scandinavian bluegrass country, tons of harmony, old time it is used, maybe a little less, but definitely find it in those ways here and there. And then there's Irish. Yeah, well, you know I play Irish music and study Irish music, but I don't necessarily identify as an Irish fiddler. But I'll give you my take and I also some words from Lexi Boatwright, who is an Irish musician, an amazing fiddler and also plays the concertina really well. The harp oh my gosh, one of these people plays everything. 

And with Irish music what's the analogy I want to draw here? You know how some forms of dance or sports or sort of physical movement are all about moving in highly synchronized and predictable ways. I feel like that's kind of Irish jamming. And then others are about moving in very improvised or unexpected ways. So musically that might be like a big sprawling old time jam where it's kind of fun. Unexpected things happen. I was jamming old time recently at Fiddler Hell with Kathy Mason, great fiddler from the band the Dead Sea Squirrels, and we were both playing a tune. We had different versions and she said afterwards she didn't change her version and I didn't change mine. She said after well, I could have just played your version, but I thought it sounded really crunchy together. I loved it. So that kind of attitude where the mess is the thing is not part of Irish. Irish sessions are more like that highly synchronized movement or music. 

So adding things like harmony is generally not completely welcome. I mean, first of all the tunes are played pretty fast and they're pretty complicated and they can be a little hard to harmonize. So many of them are modal. So people were posting this. You know, don't harmonize at Irish sessions. In the comments and Lexi put in. Lexi Boatwright that it very much depends on the context said what she has said to me before about Irish jam etiquette, which is that you want a lot of self-awareness and a lot of being observant, sensitive to the music of the group, so that what you're doing is fitting in and adding to it and you're not just like I know that one, and crashing in like an elephant. We've all done that, don't worry about it if you've done that. But she did also give a rule of thumb, which was for an Irish session no harmony unless it's a song or a slow tune like a waltz, something by O'Carolin. They were also talking about Vibrado, kind of same thing for vibrato only for long notes and slow tunes. So that's the take on Irish. But back to the genres that do use a lot of harmony. 

I've been playing harmonies for many years. I used to work them out slowly, note by note, either myself on the piano playing both notes, or with a friend asking them to slow down so you can work out what sounds good. You can figure it out yourself. Lately I use chord charts to help me harmonize. I mean once I got a little better at playing charts. What I mean is seeing a tune or a song and then above it they'll have the letters written for the chords. You know a, g, a, g chord goes with this part of the tune and now it switches to D or whatever. Because I play with singers. Especially when I play for, like church or synagogue liturgical music, I have to play a lot of harmonies with the singers and those harmonies need to fit the chords that the rhythm players are playing. So if you experiment with that, you learn to play chords. 

Follow chord charts. You can start to really harmonize. You're just looking at the melody that's printed on the page there and then you're following the shape of it, either above or below, and you're keeping half an eye on the chords so that you can make sure that your notes that you're choosing following the shape of that melody. A lot of times it's a third away or a sixth away, but then you'll get these notes where you need to adjust up or down to fit the chord. So I did get much faster at harmonizing on that. It's a good reason to get to know chords. I would encourage you to come at some point and your fiddling journey out of the melody box. We sit in that melody box a lot, but there are a lot of other things going on in music. Listen to a pop song. Someone's singing the melody, there's a lot of other stuff going on and just because you're holding the fiddle doesn't mean you just have to do melody all the time. So listen to some of those other things, experiment with those other things like harmony, and see what else could happen with your fiddle and how else you could contribute. 

Our tune is Gary Harrison tune. Gary Harrison, a very beloved old time musician who passed away about 10 years ago and in his 50s a real heartbreak for the old time community. He wrote the tune Red Prairie Dawn which was played gosh just everywhere, gorgeous tune. So this is also his tune. Boys Them Buzzards Are Flying what a great name Old time tune in A major. We played it in a cross A tuning A-E-A-E. It's got a crooked B part and a little more about Gary Harrison. 

He both fiddled and he also collected music and researched it. One of these folks lived in Indiana. Gary mostly collected music from the Midwest. Living in Indiana he collected music from older fiddlers in Illinois and kind of all around that area put together a huge collection of music called Dear Old Illinois, big collection of transcriptions and sound recordings. I don't think it's commercially available but Gary was in a band called the New Mules which continues, I believe, to still perform. His daughter is the fiddler now Genevieve, so she would be the one probably who you could look for her online and try to find out more about Gary's research, if you're interested. Also wrote great tunes. He had a collection of his music called Red Prairie Dawn which was, I believe, an album of tunes that he had written them all. So great tune and we're going to play it for you here. Boy, Them Buzzards are Flying.