Kick Out the Jams: Lanesboro, part 1
It has become apparent to me that the real action at an old-time gathering never appears on any official schedule. Certainly I was excited to participate in the sessions at the Bluff Country Gathering last weekend, to work with such luminaries as Erynn Marshall and Charlie Walden, but that’s not what why folks came. We came to kick out the jams.
On four successive nights I jammed with a procession of wonderful players, often learning tunes on the fly, picking out familiar melodies that I didn’t quite know, or playing rhythm alongside lines I couldn’t quite follow. Saturday night, walking with Chirps over to the community hall for the barn dance, I said that I had been holding on for dear life during the previous night’s jam. “Me too,” said the veteran fiddler.
“Why do we wait until we’re fried to start playing F tunes?” AJ (a simply marvelous fiddler) had wondered aloud about two in the morning that previous night. We had by then wandered as far as E-flat, and run through the handful of B-flat tunes anyone could recall before settling into the relatively accessible single flat key. Chirps, as usual, just kept pulling from his seemingly bottomless store tunes, whatever key we were in.
Chirps and AJ, along with AJ’s partner Rina and some other folks, recently released an album, Kettle Bog, under the colorful name Swamper’s Revenge (a reference to the fiddle tune “Swamper’s Revenge on the Windfall,” included, of course, on the record). All three of them attended the after hours jams that took place in the big living room at the house where I ended up staying (more on how that happened later). Those jams were the highlight of the weekend for me. The sound was beyond glorious, although being there was a little surreal. On the one hand, I had to wonder if I’d been let in by mistake, but on the other, there was no where else I’d rather have been. Just got lucky, I guess.
Part of that luck, to be sure, came from knowing Aaron, who has become a good friend over the past however many months. We met last year at the Indiana Fiddle Frolic, and have made a regular habit of hanging out and jamming. He’s also perhaps the best kept secret in Midwestern fiddling – all weekend long he brought people into jams with his boundless enthusiasm and flowing, melodic Missouri-style playing. I’m pretty sure AJ spent most of his Saturday just hanging out at the house and jamming with Aaron, who afterwards went and played the barn dance, and then returned to the house to jam for another four hours (granted, I did see home doze off on the couch at one point around 3 am, but who could blame him).
My first night in Lanesboro I spent jamming with Pat, who I met in the campgrounds. I was standing at the washhouse, filling my water bottle when Pat came walking by wearing a band with the name of some string band on it. “You must be here for the gathering,” I said, and he said he was – so I asked if he wanted to jam for a bit, and he did. 20 minutes later we were sitting in front of his camper, playing “Midnight on the Water.” Pat had a bunch of instruments with him, all of which he could play pretty well – guitar, banjo, and two fiddles. One fiddle he had tuned in “Dead Man’s” tuning – DDAD, the low G string tuned down a fourth. He explained he’d been a singer/songerwriter and dance caller in his younger days, and then taken off about 20 years to raise kids and coach baseball. In recent years he’d started writing again, so he started playing again, too.
On my way over to play with Pat, this older lady sitting in the campgrounds kind of looked at me funny – I figured either she was worried I’d make too much noise or wanted to know if she could join in – it turned out to be the later. Pat and I had been playing maybe 10 ten minutes before Mary came from around the corner with a fiddle and chair. She’d been on a hard break from fiddling the last several months, following shoulder surgery, and was looking forward to playing just as much as her body would allow that weekend. She had a hardy, rasping laugh that came out whenever she told stories that I found rather charming.
Maybe another ten minutes went by and another couple of folks – Sue and Tina – showed up to throw down some tunes. Pretty soon we were all swapping tales between tunes as we went around the circle, and before long I felt I was among friends rather than a random bunch of people I’d just met. Pat and I would run into each other throughout the weekend, chatting about tunes and so on. But everyone that night made me feel welcome and I couldn’t have been more excited to discover everything the gathering had to offer.
Besides these, I was in on a number of other jams, including a rather eclectic one somewhat earlier on Saturday night at the Sons of Norway Hall (one of the venues used by the gathering). Paul and Gail had said they wanted to try and get a singing jam going over there. I know Paul from the Fiddle Frolic as well, and he’s a folklorist and long time instructor at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. He plays fiddle, mandolin, and guitar, and has a good singing voice besides, and was the one who invited me out to Bluff Country in the first place. On the way over, they told me about how, in the Gathering’s first decade, there would always be a big jam over at Sons of Norway on Saturday night after the dance, led by organizer Bob Bovee’s partner Gail (who was the person doing most of the actual organizing it turns out). Bob had given a little tribute to her when he opened the barn dance earlier that evening, saying that she had only agreed to move out to the country with him back in 1979 if they could put on square dances, and that she had more or less decided that Bob should put on a musical gathering some twenty years after that.
At Sons of Norway Hall jam, I made a notable faux pas. I was trying to think of something gospel-y to sing, and thought to do Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light.” But, of course, I’ve always played that song at a bluegrass speed, so after a couple of verses I realized no one else was playing along. Its not as if I didn’t know not to play bluegrass (or Irish, or really anything but old-time) in an old-time circle, but somehow I thought it would be fun. But its not really fun if no one plays along.
For the most part, though, the jams were just the best kind of fun, even if I hardly knew what we were playing most of the time. Thinking of all the tunes I played now, it only makes me look forward to doing this for years to come.