Decatur Realness
I’ve been going to a monthly old-time jam in Decatur since December. It takes place in the “Thinkwell Makerspace,” a cavernous room on the second floor of the public library dedicated to various crafting activities. They’ve got all kinds of stuff in there available for public use: sewing machines, 3-D printers, hammers, saws, paints, and so on. You can see that round structure in the photo above (without all the banners and flags) from the entrance.
I’d never been to Decatur before December, but I’ve taken a liking to it. There’s a fancy-pants university endowed by some 19th century resident with more money than he knew what to do with, some careworn but still operational industry (including an ADM plant that produces vast quantities of high fructose corn syrup), and a downtown that looks like it hasn’t seen development since the 1960s. Reminds me of that quote from the Velveteen Rabbit: “…by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” Decatur is Real.
The jam is organized by a couple of Decatur locals, Phil and Jake. Phil used to play banjo but has moved over to guitar, and Jake plays fiddle. They’re both friendly and easygoing, and the jam attracts between ten and twenty folks on a given night. We play tunes for a couple hours - well, maybe a little longer than that - and jawbone about this and that. Some of the folks who show up are really good, but a lot of us are somewhere in the fair to middlin’ range of proficiency. At the most recent jam, there was one guy who had a sticker on his violin case: “World’s Okayest Fiddle Player.” The emphasis on not needing to impress anyone is always encouraging to me, and helpful to the music’s inclusive spirit.
When you go to a jam, everyone sits in a circle. Someone will start playing a tune (I guess sometimes they announce it, but it seems more often they just start playing) and that person is then responsible for giving “the foot,” whereby you sort of kick out your foot to signal the end of the tune. That usually happens after the third or fourth time through. I suppose you could decide not to give the signal and keep going indefinitely, but I’ve never seen that happen. My first time there, I started up “Decatur Reel,” because it’s not terribly difficult, and it seemed appropriate for the location. Afterwards, someone asked if I had learned it from Charlie Walden, and I said I had, and they told me they’d taught it to him, and that it was actually named for Decatur, Nebraska.
This is one of the things that happens at a jam: there are always discussions of where a tune is from and who taught it to whom and other such trivia. It’s another thing I like about old-time players: they’re nerds. Collecting vast troves of knowledge about incredibly obscure music so you can talk to other people similarly possessed of vast accumulations of myriad ephemera is part of the joy of getting together. And it’s not really about who can come up with the most obscure tune or whatever - it’s always about making connections. It’s fun to impress your friends, and the nerding out just facilitates making impressions on one another as part of a process of creating friendships.
Most of the tunes you encounter at a jam are not super obscure, of course, because the main thing is to play stuff that people know. Having now been out to Decatur a few times now, I’ve become familiar with some of the tunes that folks there know. Some of them I can name - the central Illinois classic “Walk Old Shoe, Heel Come a Draggin,” which Jake affectionately calls “Here Comes the Dragon,” for example. Others I can recognize within a couple of bars, and follow along without trouble.
A couple of months ago I attended a jam session at the University of Chicago Folk Festival, led by Chirps Smith. Chirps is one of best old-time Midwestern fiddlers playing, and I felt lost most of the time - his playing is bouncy and quick, and he likes to add ornaments. We were in "A" most of the time I was there, and I recall at one point playing a tune called "Dinah," which it turns out is pretty obscure. I've been trying to learn it for the last 6 weeks, but it's tricky. A lot of the phrases go over the same three or four notes, without repeating, and keeping the order straight has been challenging for me. But it was a fun tune, and I recall Chirps saying afterwards "Nothing fine-ah than Dinah!" So I keep sawing away at it.
Festival jams are great because they just go on and on. There are usually breakout jams for folks who want to get into more obscure stuff, and then other jams just wailing on the classics. Regular jams don't seem to have the same relentless energy, but they're great for building up community. And that sense of community is one of the things I value most about playing old-time music, so I'm really grateful that there's a jam for me to go to every month. That I've become familiar with Decatur, and deepened my knowledge of central Illinois in the process, has been a bonus.