There are at least three people I’ve met personally who have composed tunes that seem to have made it into the old-time canon. I think it’s kind of a big deal to get a tune into regular circulation, because it seems like a wholly spontaneous process. People jam, and the tunes that get played are the ones people like to play. Its not like with popular music, where promotion is (almost) everything.

The business of popular culture is genuinely fascinating to me because of the interplay between creativity, production, and promotion. I don’t think old-time music is altogether separate from the culture industry, as it were, but, in practice, its different enough that popular music feels more or less irrelevant. It’s odd, considering that the music was new at some point and popular enough that, decades later, a bunch of folks were still playing it.

Last night I was out in Decatur - playing A tunes the whole time, we were - and at one point we were discussing the tune Grey Eagle. There is more than one tune with that name - notably “Grey Eagle in C” from the great Cyril Stinnet - and word around the circle was that it comes from the name of a famous 19th century racehorse. You know, because before there was NASCAR (there were bootleggers and the revenuers chasing them) there were race horses, and people knew the names of great ones like they know big deal racecar drivers now. It also came up in conversation that, among Grey Eagle’s progeny was Robert E. Lee’s mount, Traveler. Not sure how I feel about the association, to be honest - but Lee has admirers yet, and I suppose its no use getting upset about it.

Anyways, horse culture was once a part of everyday life in the Americas - and you simply must include South America here, where cowboy culture is perhaps even more important than it is here - and its now pretty obscure. Horses tend to be the province of the well-to-do (Queen Elizabeth II was low-key obsessed with them), but there’s a whole subculture built around horses and horseracing (which I know about mostly from reading Ruby Murphy mysteries), and a good deal of it less savory than Snoop Dog’s lighthearted commentary on dressage might suggest.

Old-time music does seem to have a bit of the feel of high-culture at times (that is to say, its a practice of privileged elites rather than ordinary folks) but also similar to horse culture it ties back to a time before modern life and the industrial age. There really was a time, not so long ago, when fiddle music was common throughout North America, and when we play that music, when we engage in that tradition, we connect ourselves in some way to a culture that once, but no longer, was the predominant one in society.

Of late I’ve been wondering to myself why old-time music seems impervious to the influence of popular music, especially that of the post-war era (i.e., after 1945). Surely fiddlers are influenced in some way by myriad styles of music they encounter - but playing “Tipping Back the Corn” last night, I wouldn’t have known it. I haven’t heard of an old-time analogue to the stylized versions of pop songs like the Pickin On series or Post-Modern Jukebox, but maybe that’s as it should be. And because old-time is relatively obscure, it does not play the genre game particularly well. But old-time musicians don’t seem especially interested in “crossing over,” and who needs a blend of old-time, reggae, and metal anyways?

Along the same lines you might trace the separation of “country” and “old-time” back to AP Carter copyrighting songs he poached out in the hills and the hollers. Country music is commercial in a way old-time is not - those three composers I mentioned earlier, people play their tunes, but not in a way that produces a revenue stream. You might even trace it back further: Beethoven made a tidy income arranging Scottish folk songs with piano accompaniment, for the purpose of publishing books of them. Lots of composers have used folk melodies in their work, notably Bartok, Stravinsky, and Copland (who’s famous “Hoe-down” from the ballet “Rodeo” is a setting of “Bonaparte’s Retreat”).

But the point is: old-time is, for the most part, at least, non-commercial music. Nobody is in it for the money (or the glamour, for that matter). Or at least it seems like that, to me - and that seems almost unbelievable, because I spend so much time thinking in terms of production and consumption (you know, because I’m an economist during the day). It makes me a little suspicious, I suppose. Really? No one is selling anything? Are you sure? I’m accustomed to finding economic motivations for everything. And yet, old-time resists those categories.