A couple of weekends ago I went up to St. Paul, Minnesota for the Twin Town Old Time Music Festival and had a great time playing music there. Driving home afterwards I started thinking about writing about the experience and, on reflection, I’ve summed it up with the title of this post: the fruit is only as good as the jam.

The phrase started out as “a fiddler is only as good as the jam,” and I’ll say more about that below, but the metaphor is this: an individual piece of fruit may be extraordinary, but it’s excellence is fleeting, and subjective besides. Jam is made from individual fruits, some sugar and water, some heat, and perhaps a canning process. A good jam stays with us. It might remind us of other jams, of other times and places. In old-time, jamming is collaborative, and no one individual element is more important than the jam itself - therefore, the measure of the player is the measure of what they bring to the collaboration. I suppose that’s something most old-time players know already, but it felt especially relevant to me that weekend.

The Festival took place at the Celtic Junction Arts Center, a friendly little spot situated on what appears to be the leading edge of gentrification in post-industrial St. Paul. There were workshops and dancing, conversations and discussions, a delightful Friday night concert and tater tots afterwards - but, as usual, jamming tunes was the main event. Mostly I jammed with people I hadn’t met before. I’ve spent a good deal of time this spring learning B-flat hornpipes and other noodley tunes, which are great for focused practicing on my own, but hardly ideal in a jam circle. A lot of the time I was just trying to hang on, playing tunes I was familiar with but didn’t really know. Once in a while I was able to contribute a tune that others seemed to enjoy, and that felt rewarding. By the time I headed out in the small hours of Saturday night, it seemed to me that being part of jam is all about what you bring to the circle. A person might be a fabulous player, but if they can’t bring folks along for the ride, they’re not really jamming.

I feel like I’ve come a long way since attending Bluff Country last May - certainly I know more tunes, but also I have a much better familiarity with the music. I’ve started compiling a list of tunes I encounter in jams for to learn on my own - it’s still surprising to me how many well-known tunes there are that I just don’t know (and, vice versa, how many tunes I do know that near nobody else seems to).

I encountered this sort of thing in a jam Saturday morning with Ruby John - one of the day’s facilitated jams hosted by a festival performer. I had gotten in early that morning, right at 9 am (because the festival website said things got started at 9 am - I might have been the first attendee on site, although, on the upside, I did get a sweet parking spot), and had plenty of coffee (they had a proper urn set up in the lobby), so when I rolled into the session maybe 10 minutes early, I was raring to go. Ruby John was there chatting with Grace van’t Hof, one half of the Velvet Twins, a marvelous old-timey honky-tonk country duo who had hosted the previous night’s stage performance. I joined the conversation, talking about how much I had enjoyed Ruby John’s “Whitefish Rapids” (in a set with “Mitton’s Breakdown”), as it’s a B-flat tune I’d not previously encountered. I didn’t mention it at the time, but I recorded that bit of the performance on my phone, as I plan to learn the tune. I asked if she knew “Backside of Buncombe,” which I picked up from Chirps Smith last autumn. It was the title track of one of the Volo Bogtrotter’s records, and it seems like it ought to be pretty well known on that account, but she didn’t know it and so asked me to play it. I plodded my way through the tune - I futzed a few phrases, but I think it came off alright - and as I got to the end, AJ Srubas stuck his head in the door and said “Hell yeah, Backside of Buncombe! I walked down the aisle to that when I got married.”

Shortly thereafter, the room began to fill up, and we got down to the business of jamming. Ruby John suggested starting in the key of G, and I lead “Squirrelheads and Gravy,” which I learned recently at a jam in Bloomington. Apparently it’s named for a real hill country delicacy which involves smashing open the roasted skulls of squirrels and sucking out the brains - a detail I’m starting to think goes better unmentioned sometimes. We played “Squirrel Hunters” afterwards, among other tunes. I would have liked to hang out with Ruby John more, but before long it was time to head off to the next session. I hustled out to the parking lot to grab my guitar and then made for the library to learn about playing back-up in old-time music.

It’s a funny thing to see a room full of middle-aged folks with acoustic guitars earnestly paying attention to a pair of country boys in their early 20’s. Hawken Boldman and Mason Herbold are both part of the group Scrivner and the Bold Characters (what a great band name!), who have been carrying the flame of Ozark style square dance down in Douglas County, Missouri. They were engaging presenters, if a little chatty. Clearly they could have talked about playing guitar all day long, and I could probably have gone along with that - at one point one of them asked if anyone in the room was a music theory nerd, to which I think I might have been the only person who said “yes” - but it seems like a lot of the folks there could have done with learning one or two specific things. Exemplary here was the attempt to explain “Missouri Rules,” a chord progression utilized by many Ozark guitarists. They managed at least to explain that it’s a kind of deceptive term, as the progression’s only definitive hallmark is the IV chord in the sixth bar of an eight bar section, notable because the chord is used whether it fits the melody or not, and a matter of long simmering controversy. But somehow the discussion slipped away after that.

Boldman and Herbold are both out of central casting (at least a little bit, anyways): cowboy boots, jeans, button down shirts, trucker hats, all goofy grins and anxiety-touched confidence - conscious, perhaps, of their twangy accents. But they gave a compelling account of their guitar playing: Ozark style square dance is performed at a relatively fast tempo (around 140 beats per minute), and the style is formed around a utilitarian approach to playing that way for 3 hours at a stretch. The guitarist’s primary function is playing a quasi-contrapuntal bass line alongside the fiddle tune while occasionally strumming chords on the off-beats. It strikes a balance between providing a solid harmonic foundation for the music while also keeping the rhythm moving. There was a notable chromaticism in some the runs that made me wonder if the Missouri Rules aren’t a covert way of keeping the sophistication of jazz harmony at bay. The prevalence of open tunings in Appalachian old-time makes chromatic harmony difficult (if not impossible), whereas the Ozark tradition seems much closer to Western Swing or Texas Contest style.

Speaking of Missouri old-time, the playing of (the legendary) Cyril Stinnet came up numerous times in the Fiddle Masterclass that afternoon. The funny thing about AJ Srubas is that, despite being self-taught, he is a gifted instructor. At one point he shared that he came up with the idea of doing a masterclass as an instructor at week-long fiddle camps, where, by the middle of the week, students would get a little burnt out on the constant playing in sessions. A masterclass focuses on one person at a time, while remaining participatory through open discussion. There were eight or nine of us signed up for the session, with the order being determined by drawing names from a hat (I ended up going first - which was fine, I had thought about what I wanted to do ahead of time). By the end of it we all agreed that we found the whole thing interesting and helpful, from start to finish. I asked for help with a particularly tricky bar of Highland (aka High Level) Hornpipe, a B-flat tune I’ve been working on for the last couple of months that includes a good deal of arpeggios. Srubas referenced Stinnet as a model of playing the tune, emphasizing legato, but not necessarily slurred, bowing technique and gave me some pointers on how to even out the string crossings. A lot of the discussion during the workshop focused on practice routines, a good deal of it related to bowing. One particularly relatable moment came when Srubas told a participant that sometimes it’s good to play a tune at full speed and let the mistakes happen - not something you necessarily hear people say, but something that I do in practice sessions to counteract the urge to go back and correct myself when playing in a jam (which is easier said than done).

As the master class wrapped up, Srubas looked at us smiling and said “See? Wasn’t that fun?” to which we all readily agreed. I had begun to pack up before looking at the schedule to see where I was going next, but it turned out I wasn’t going anywhere, as I had previously decided on attending Marc Janssen’s session on tunes he learned from the late Al Murphy and that was to take place in the room I was already in - so I sat tight. Janssen comes out of rural Iowa, a place I gather is a lot like my own neck of the woods (er, plains) in north central Illinois. And it turns out he grew up in a small river valley town in northern Illinois. He brought along his partner to play banjo and a friend, who happened to be Al Murphy’s widow, to play guitar, and I’m embarrassed to say I can’t recall their names.

In any event, Janssen led us through a nice solid tune learning session - the meat and potatoes of this sort of gathering - teaching “Mag Brown” and “Kansas City Rag.” It wasn’t anything mind blowing. We learned some tunes, heard some stories about Al Murphy, whose career as a fiddle player was impressive, and then it was time for dinner.

Friday night, after the concert, I had stuck around for the semi-festival-official jam afterwards. Chirps was there, leading tunes, and a whole bunch of other folks besides. The lady with the purple hair who sat next to Chirps I’ve definitely seen before, but I couldn’t tell you her name either. But we played some good tunes - I think I played “White River Bottoms” at some point, a tune I often like to throw out in a jam, as its both relatively obscure and not terribly difficult to learn on the fly. Someone was in back of the building with a deep fryer, cooking off tater tots and serving them in little paper bowls (I had two). The banjo player I was sitting next to was friendly, and there were a bunch of people kind of hanging around, some of them intermittently dancing - you could tell it was a good dance floor because you could feel the boards vibrate with the dancers. Afterwards, I met a few of the others who made it to the end of the night, and I spent most of the following evening jamming and hanging out with some of them.

I’ve been coming up to Minnesota from Illinois for years and the people there seem almost uniformly delightful. And while I know that Minnesota has all the different sorts of people you find anywhere, the people at Twin Town were in line with my previous experiences. Somehow I ended up jamming both nights with Caleb (fiddle) and Hailey (fiddle and banjo) - Caleb has an easygoing smile and a grip of tunes, and he would often help move the jam along; Hailey had come out from the west coast, and travels a good deal for old-time festivals, having first fallen down the rabbit hole attending the Swannanoa gathering in North Carolina.

Some of the tunes we played I know well enough to play along, and the ones I didn’t know were usually easy enough I could learn a good bit of it on the fly. I am not always good at calling tunes, because I like note-y tunes. Some friends suggested to me not long ago that I learn “Angus Campbell,” a reel in A descended from some old Scots tune, and when I was looking for a version to learn, I happened upon a transcription from Cyril Stinnett, and learned that one. It’s fun to play, but it’s not for beginners. When I pulled it out in Decatur a few weeks ago, it was just me and a couple of rhythm players - I played it through just twice before giving it the foot. No one likes a jam buster.

Sometime around one in the morning on the second night of the Festival, we were in A, and all looking at each other between tunes, like “ok, who’s got one…” and all I could think of was Carrolton County Breakdown and Coming Down From Denver - tunes where you either know them or you don’t. It was Caleb who called the last tune of the night - Sweet Nell, which has been living rent free in my head all this past week. We were the second to last jam in the building. I don’t think I properly said goodbye to anyone. Hopefully I’ll see them again in some other jam circle somewhere.