A few tunes
Last night I played some tunes with my buddy Aaron, and we recorded three of them on my phone, and I posted them to Soundcloud just now. It seemed like, if I’m going to write about playing fiddle, I ought to have something available for people to hear.
The tune “Lantern in the Ditch,’ for which this newsletter is named, is one of the tracks I posted. This one I learned directly from Aaron - I recorded him playing it one night on my phone and then learned it from the recording. I have a nifty recording app on my phone, “Easy Voice Recorder,” that has the capability of slowing down or speeding up the playback. I’ve used it to record lots of tunes, and half-speed is really helpful when I’m working out a tune. “Lantern in the Ditch” is a three-part tune in D, where the first section is 4-bars repeated, so it sounds like the same thing played through four times, and then two sections of 8-bars, each played once. A little unusual. I especially like the melodic third section.
The other two tunes (both in A) are “Coming down from Denver” and “Green Mountain Hornpipe,” from R.P Christiansen’s Old Time Fiddler’s Repertory. The former tune comes from Bob Walters, considered one of the great Missouri fiddlers, although he might have actually been from Nebraska. Walters had a regular feature on the radio back in the 1930’s and 40’s, making him the rare professional fiddler. Christiansen describes him as having a nearly bottomless store of tunes in addition to an exceptionally fine technique. The latter tune comes from Bill Driver, of Iberia, Missouri, a small town about an hour south of Jefferson City. Driver, born in 1881 to a former slave turned Baptist preacher, was black, and therefore never achieved the prominence of Walters, but was nonetheless considered one of the finest dance fiddlers of his day. There are several albums of his playing from around 1950 available on Bandcamp - he’s got rhythm like a freight train. Recordings of Walters are, funnily enough, harder to come by.
My hope is to produce somewhat more polished recordings in the next year or so, but for the time being, I think these turned out pretty well. I was really glad to be able to play along with Aaron, who’s been a great friend and given me a lot of help and encouragement in learning fiddle.