What is Old Time Music? (9)

[Ptarmigan]

OK To get us started, here's a page of links which look at what Old Time music really is & where it came from.

'What is Old Time Music' by Mike Seeger
"After Native Americans, the first people to settle in this region came from the British Isles in the mid-1700's. These early settlers included Scots-Irish but were primarily English. A small number of immigrants later came to this area from Germany. ...... Communities were also nearly self sufficient culturally, and almost everyone could either sing, play an instrument, dance, or tell a story, usually in a style distinctly their own. English-language culture was dominant."
What is Old Time Music?

The Early Settlers of Appalachia – Part I
The people who settled the Appalachians were generally of three ethnic origins: Scots-Irish, English, and German .Primarily farmers and skilled craftsmen, they were used to hard work and not intimidated by the intense labor that was mountain life.

The Early Settlers of Appalachia – Part I

The Early Settlers of Appalachia – Part II
Part II – Family and Hard Work
It’s very likely that seventy-five percent of the people who now live in the Appalachians of Virginia and North Carolina are descendents of these first settlers, and they retain many of the admirable traits characteristic of their ancestors.

The Early Settlers of Appalachia – Part II

‘Appalachian Celts And Their Music’ by Charles H Ball
"When the Celtic people settled the Appalachian region they had their hands full: Indians, bears, wilderness, weather, topography ..........you name it. They were not inclined to worry much about their roots, except the ones they planted in the ground. All they knew was that they had escaped tyranny, poverty, and oppression of one kind or another and were now planted in a new world, a world they had yet to conquer. And this conquest would be a full-time job. Today, three centuries later, most of their descendants have no sense of being Irish, or Scots-Irish, or Welsh, or Scottish."
Appalachian Celts And Their Music

'Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier' by Alan Jabbour
"I had supposed that the repertory and style in the Upper South were originally 'British', and then by new composition and gradual stylistic evolution became more regionally distinctive. But as the other elements of my original model were eroded, I began to contemplate the possibility that the Southern fiddling style I was documenting in the 20th century took shape much earlier than I had originally imagined. In particular, I reflected on the bowing patterns I had been laboriously transcribing from my fiddling mentors. Many of them used bowing patterns in which were imbedded elaborate forms of syncopation. Now it should be stipulated that syncopation has many forms. Any performance that establishes one rhythmic pattern, then superimposes a different pattern in contradistinction to the original pattern, is using syncopation. But the syncopated bowing patterns of my fiddling mentors were precisely what we all think of as “American syncopation,” appearing in jazz and popular music and commonly presumed to be an African American contribution to our musical heritage."

[/color]
Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier[/quote]

"Old-time (oldtimey) Music What is it?
"The early days of old-time music are unfortunately not well-documented, and there are various theories of how it started and spread. This first one I got from Bob Flesher. White minstrels popularized the banjo in urban centers before the Civil War. The banjo went back to the mountains with veterans from that war. When people began to play banjos and fiddles together, fiddle playing changed. (See the notes, for example, to the Emmett Lundy LP.) After reading Conway's African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia (see book list below), I would lean toward another theory. Conway gives persuasive evidence that black banjo players taught both minstrels and white mountain musicians to play the banjo directly. Just one of her arguments is that there are lots of common tunings between earlier black banjoists and mountain banjoists that weren't used by minstrels."
Old-time (oldtimey) Music What is it?

Old Time Music
by Gordon Banks

What am I calling old-time music? When I use the term, I mean the traditional folk music of the Southern Appalachians. This music wa based on fiddle music of the British Isles mixed with the influences of black musicians, both slave and free. The fiddle came over from Europe with the emmigrants, the banjo came from Africa in primitive form and was refined and developed in the US cities starting before the Civil War. The Civil War spread the banjo and the minstrel tunes popular in that time into the remote Appalachian mountains, where they were adopted. The guitar came somewhat later, around the turn of the century.

Old Time Music - by Gordon Banks

Why Old Time is Different from Bluegrass?

Reflections on how bluegrass music is different from old time Appalachian music and why there can be no name that will cover both no matter what Nashville or the media is presently saying . (From three email posts to Banjo-L by Allen Feldman)

It has been suggested that we need an inclusive cover name that would bring oldtime music bluegrass, clawgrass and dawg music under the same umbrella in order to attract new audiences. The unfortunate trend in this country is to homogenize things. I think oldtime music stands against homogenization; it celebrates an intractable, idiosyncratic difference. To come up with a cover name that unites oldtime with bluegrass and other styles like roots music etc. is to accept the myth bluegrass tells itself about its origins. But that myth is only a half-truth.

Why Old Time is Different from Bluegrass?

What is Old Time Music?
by Kim Ruehl

Old Time Music has been enjoying a bit of a resurgence in the last few years. Popular groups on the scene include the all-women Uncle Earl, as well as a slew of artists from the Northwest, such as Foghorn Stringband, the Tallboys Stringband, and British Columbia's Outlaw Social. Classic old time artists include Doc Watson and, more classically, Clarence Watson, Tommy Jarrell, and Charlie Poole.

What is Old Time Music? by Kim Ruehl

Old Time Music

[dulcimike]

And here's a good webpage for an explanation of the difference between Old-Time and Bluegrass:

www.dwightdiller.com/bluegrass.html

Dwight Diller is a well-known Old-Time banjo player and teacher.

[Ptarmigan]

Thanks Rick, that's a great link.

I'll post it above & next door - Ta

Cheers
Dick

[Ptarmigan]

Here's another interesting look at Old Time which I found on a Forum, but which sadly had no link to it's origin. Anyway, I thought you might find it interesting.

Cheers
Dick

Labels are necessary components of the ideas and experiences we fit into our lives. With labels, we differentiate. Where would marketing be without them? Some labels have the ability to be simultaneously pleasing and/or pejorative, depending on one's point of view. Such a label is `old time music.' We may interpret it to denote (A) hopelessly outdated music or (B) deeply authentic music. Could it be both, music rooted in pre-video (even pre-radio) rural America and thus heroically anachronistic?

`Old time music' may suggest sounds rooted in pre-mass media Americana, but it is no less a marketing label than is `urban' (contemporary black music) or `young country' (post-Garth Nashville pop). It's just an older sales hook. This one can be traced to 1923, when Georgia's Fiddlin' John Carson waxed The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane and The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Going to Crow for the OKeh label. Legendary A-man Ralph Peer deemed Carson's performance "pluperfect awful," but enough rural Americans disagreed to make the record a hit, the first in the history of what's now called country music. (Ever the pragmatist, Carson remarked at his first whiff of success:, "I'll have to quit making moonshine and start making records.") Carson's paean to barnyard fertility rites and bucolic cabins initially appeared in OKeh's popular music catalog, where it kept uneasy company with slicker stuff. Where to put such downhome keening and sawing? The company which had three years prior pioneered `race' recording with Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" opted for `old time music' as a descriptive moniker for records by artists of Carson's ilk, and OKeh's label has prevailed.

But just what was a 1920s commercial record company selling with `old-time music'? Something not jazz age surely, but what specifically? [Old-time banjo picker] Clarence Ashley's observations suggest that the record companies, at least from the artists' viewpoint, had a dim understanding of this music, though we sense a general `grasp of genre' when reviewing vintage `old time music' recordings today. A few obvious generalizations bear witness to this. Most of the `old time' musicians were white rural agrarian Southerners. Their singing, by European art music standards, was unschooled (though not necessarily `artless'). The same might be said of their musicianship, expressed primarily via strings. Their song repertoire could be broadly divided between secular and sacred and further subdivided into categories of traditional, commercial (often of sufficient vintage to have entered oral tradition), and original (often topical and tragic) songs. These general elements are found equally in the commercial `old time music' recordings of the 1920s and in the performances captured decades later.

`Old time music,' then, is a music rich in cultural continuity. Alan Lomax has written in his essay "Folk Song Style" (American Anthropologist, LXI, No. 6, December 1959) that such music is intent to "give the listener a feeling of security, for it symbolizes the place where he was born, his earliest childhood satisfactions, his religious experience, his pleasure in community doings, his courtship and his work - any or all of these personality-shaping experiences." Such music, drenched deep in its listeners' "personality-shaping experiences," is inherently powerful, and was especially so in a culture, marginally literate and pre-electronic, where it was among the strongest threads of the social fabric. Religious faith and fable (Daniel Prayed) were underscored in song. Socially accepted pleasures (square dancing) were set to brisk rhythms and tunes. Balladic sagas of the bad (John Hardy) and the beautiful (The Four Marys) were more readily remembered (and strikingly heard) when Sung. Resonant in meaning and methodology, `old time music' had been the heartbeat of Anglo-Celtic Southern America for many generations. By the time it became a marketing label which celebrated its own quaintness, its days were numbered. The technology which enables us to savor Fiddlin' John Carson 70 years after his heyday also heralded the demise of the charmed circle of oral tradition and relative isolation which had nurtured old time music since the coming of the South's first Anglo-Celtic settlers.

The notion that this tradition was simultaneously endangered by twentieth century modernity yet preserved in the remote South was dramatized by English folklorist Cecil Sharp's 1916-1918 song-collecting field trip, the fruits of which were published in 1919 as English Folk Songs From the Southern Appalachians. Sharp found American variants of many hoary British ballads with impressive pedigrees. Songs scarcely remembered in their land of origin still held a kind of `racial memory' spell over Southern descendants of expatriated yeomen. But the ballad tradition was not static: newer songs of outlaws and train wrecks sprang up alongside old ones of knights and ladies. In a rural society where newspapers were rare outside cities and literacy limited, the ballad makers filled the role of dramatist/news anchor. This Southern penchant for story songs, often of a morbid bent, remained a striking element of even commercial country music until fairly recently.

[If many documented old-time performances] are of ballads, plenty more illustrate varied instruments and instrumental styles. By far the oldest type of instrument played [in this genre] is the Appalachian dulcimer, though technically this `mountain dulcimer' is misnamed: true dulcimers are struck with beaters (thus `hammered dulcimer' is redundant). A plucked zither, the Appalachian dulcimer's basic design is ancient: the legendary Pythagorean Monochord, from whence the rudiments of the diatonic major scale were supposedly derived some 2500 years ago, may have looked similar. The instrument's antiquity belies the fact that it was a relative latecomer to the American South. It didn't come over on the Mayflower or any other ship of British origin. Germans and other Northern Europeans apparently brought such instruments in the 19th century, when they were spread via the Pennsylvania side of the Appalachians into the American South. A newcomer as late as the 1890s, the Appalachian dulcimer's apparently medieval design and penchant for modal tunes disguised the fact that it was, among folk instruments in the South, a new kid on the block.

Though more modern in design and far more difficult to play, the unchallenged favorite instrument for generations of Americans was the fiddle. The first documented fiddle contest in America took place in 1736; for two centuries fiddlers were necessary components of most successful social functions, especially anywhere dancing might occur. Often deemed a mite disreputable, the fiddler was a living repository of tradition who imbued venerable tunes with fresh fingerprints, a characteristic assertion fell variously in the gloriously unpolished [performances of] Tommy Jarrell and the more disciplined (but no less spirited) [of] Marion Sommers.

Despite the European background of much of this music and of such instruments as the fiddle, the influence of African-American phrasing and syncopation profoundly affected old time music. (This influence becomes particularly striking when you compare American stringband music to that of Canada, a New World culture which lacked a significant African-American presence.) The banjo is the most obvious legacy of African-Americans in old time music, for the instrument itself is African in origin. It came to white Southerners via the nineteenth century minstrel show, vestiges of which echoed in such performers as Uncle Dave Macon, an early Opry star imitated [more recently] by his longtime accompanist, Sam McGee. Compared to the banjo, the guitar was both a latecomer and a folk instrument by commercial fiat. It was in the late nineteenth century that such mail order catalogues as Sears & Roebuck made inexpensive mass-produced guitars widely available, and it was by such prosaic means that the guitar and mandolin entered Appalachia. The emergence of a Doc Watson was unforeseen by the catalog dispensers.

There is a sketchy background of old time music and the means by which it was made. The social and natural environments which nurtured this music are no less important to understanding it than are matters of instruments and ethnicity, but the interested reader will look elsewhere to learn of them. During the folk music revivals which spanned the late 1950s-70s, much of the extraordinary music recorded by commercial labels in the 1920s was reissued, legendary artists were rediscovered, and previously unheard exponents of the `old time' tradition were likewise found and brought to perform at folk festivals. It was an exciting epoch which coupled `living legends' like Clarence Ashley and Tommy Jarrell with younger incarnations of the `old time' spirit (New Lost City Ramblers, Red Clay Ramblers, etc.). Some fine music was played and a fitting `last hurrah' was sung to a final generation of musicians who absorbed this music by osmosis as their primary music, a core "personality-shaping experience." By the time men like Roscoe Holcomb were passing from the scene such young rural Kentuckians as Ricky Skaggs were aggressively moving into Nashville's commercial mainstream. Skaggs made it in 1981 (the year of Holcomb's death) with a country-rock version of Lester Flatt's Don't Get Above Your Raising; by then a Kentucky boy's raisin' was more apt to include Led Zeppelin than the `lassy-makin' tunes' of Clarence Ashley's youth. The heavy metal hillbilly rant of the Kentucky Headhunters soon followed (their first hit was a buckskin-and-downers version of Bill Monroe's Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine), and the [genre of] `old time music' receded like dream fragments of ancient ballads saved fast in the memories of a dwindling few tradition keepers.

[Ptarmigan]

Here is another look at the origins of Old Time Music.

It was scanned in from the "Ulster-Scots trail to America" a 16 page supplement in the Belfast News Letter of 15th June 2006

Music that crossed the Atlantic.....

The distinctive styles of many ' modern-day American country, bluegrass and folk music performers can be traced directly back to the 18th century Ulster-Scots or Scots-Irish frontier settlers.
The dance tradition of the Appalachian region in the south eastern part of the United States has also very strong Ulster-Scots roots.

This is music and dance which crossed the Atlantic during the great waves of emigration and, in the modern idiom, it is a rich cultural expression which is being taken back to the homeland. The Ulster-Scots sound of drone notes, associated with the pipes and fiddles, are very pronounced and the story-telling balladry of the Scots-Irish diaspora remains deeply rooted in what is American country and folk music today. These were a people who brought with them to North America the old Scottish, Irish and English folk songs and ballads, and in remote communities in the Appalachian, Cumberland and Great Smoky Mountain regions, the songs stayed unaltered until the 20th century. Music lightened toil for early Scots-Irish pioneers with the fiddle giving the lift at weddings, and Jew's Harp providing accompaniment along the wagon roads to the new settlements. Dulcimer, banjo and mandolin were other favoured instruments on the frontier, traditional backing for the nasal vocals of the hardy settler people. The fiddle, distinctively Scottish and Irish, was the main instrument for playing the tunes and providing backing for the traditional songs. It was the first musical instrument in the Appalachian region 200/250 years ago. There might have been one fiddle in a whole community and one player.

The Appalachian mountain people, where Scots-Irish culture is so strong, have maintained a folk song culture for several centuries. Leading balladeers and folk historian from the early 20th century Cecil Sharpe related how he discovered nearly every one he met in the mountain region, young and old, could either sing or play an instrument.

The ballads which Sharp collected in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Carolinas and North Georgia were in the traditional vein, with Scots-Irish influences a very dominant strain.

Popular Appalachian folk songs and times like The Girl Prom Knoxville, Barbara Allen, The Irish Washerwoman, Haste to the Wedding, The Virginia Reel, The Green River March and Turkey in the Straw are in that tradition. The music of the American frontier was primarily vocal, through the singing of hymns and folk songs. In the very early settlements in Pennsylvania from the 1720s, the fiddle provided the musical background for the reels and jigs which the Scots-Irish enjoyed.

In the austere, and at times lonely surroundings of the frontier, music was the source which brightened the lives of the settlers.

Fiddle styles varied from state to state, even within states. Individual fiddlers differed in the way they held the instrument, the emphasis which they devoted to noting and the manner in which they bowed.
Some fiddlers stuck resolutely to the melody, while others improvised freely or employed their own prepared techniques -all a very Scots-Irish trait! Richard Nevins, in his Book Old-Time Fiddle Classics, notes that since fiddling was a Celtic art, modern aficionados strain to establish a direct link between Celtic styles and Appalachian in renditions.

Nevins maintained it is likely all the countless variations in southern fiddling are traceable to seven or eight different styles brought over to America by the predominant Celtic-cultured immigrants from various sections of the north of Ireland, southern Scotland and, to a lesser degree, parts of England. While yodelling has its origins in the Swiss mountains, many performers of a Scots-Irish background in states like Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia, were adept at raising the tone to a falsetto head voice.

Gospel music was very dear to the Godfearing Scots-Irish and many colloquial hymns, later adopted in mainstream Christianity had origins in the Appalachian region, Methodist evangelical hymns of Isaac Watts, John Newton and John and Charles Wesley struck a chord with those moving along the Great Wagon Road to the frontier.

Bluegrass music is strongly linked to the Scots-Irish folk of Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee and leading Nashville performer Ricky Skaggs is very proud of his roots. "My family on my mother's side were Scots-Irish - they were the Fergusons who left Limavady and East Donegal in the 18th century. They eventually moved to Kentucky, where I grew up with a real taste for bluegrass music, which has its origins in the north of Ireland and Scotland. To me traditional country music had a value in it, a wholesomeness and warmth that some of the other kinds of music don't have. It's our heritage, our roots, it's everything that we're about," says Ricky. Dolly Parton, Nashville's first lady of country, also has strong Scots-Irish family roots - her late father Robert Lee Parton could trace his roots back to the early settlers. At Dolly's theme park at Pigeon Forge in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennesse, the musical documentary "Fire on the Mountain" tells the fascinating story of American country music and its historical roots, particularly the Scots-Irish theme.

The musical narration confirms the link: "And so they came ... a strong-willed people who forged their homes out of this region and brought their love and - beauty with them. The deeds of our Scots-Irish ancestors are blended with the skills of the musicians who seized the Smokies' fiery spirit, and this heritage has been passed on from generation to generation...!" Other American country stars with Scots-Irish connections bluegrass performers include the late Bill Monroe, and Jim and Jesse McReynolds, as well as the Everly brothers, Loretta Lynn and her sister Crystal Gayle, Jean Shepherd, Emmylou Harris, George Hamilton IV the late Billy Walker and the late Roy Acuff, presenter at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville for many years; not forgetting Clayton McMichen, a noted old-tyme early 20th century musician from Georgia, whose family left Ulster in the late 18th century. The dance tradition in America is very ethnically-based. Irish, Scottish and English "clogging" forms of dancing blended over the years in the Appalachians, although there were slight variations from region to region, hill and holler, one to another. The cultural roots in a community could be detected by the dances they did. they were was a lot of instrumental backing for the Scots-Irish forms of dancing, with dancers operating quite a bit on their toes, from a very erect still upper and body movement.

CELEBRATED American songwriter Stephen Collins Foster was a second generation Ulster-Scot whose family emigrated from Londonderry to Pennsylvania in the late 18th century. Foster, born near Pittsburgh in 1826, wrote 200 classic songs, among them Beautiful Dreamer, Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair, My Old Kentucky Home and Campton Races.

JIMMY Kennedy, a songwriter born in Omagh, Co Tyrone, in the early part of the 20th century, became a renowned name in American popular music, writing classic songs such as South of the Border Down Mexico Way and Red Sails in the Sunset. Singers like Gene Autry and Bing Crosby had major hits with his songs.

[dulcimike]

admin said:

Here's another interesting look at Old Time which I found on a Forum, but which sadly had no link to it's origin. Anyway, I thought you might find it interesting.

Cheers
Dick

I think this may be to site from which they got it.....

www.oldtimemusic.com/otdef.html

And I just noticed that they give a source for the article by Mark Humphrey "re-printed" on the Old Time Music site on the left of the page:

Mark Humphrey's article is part of a booklet included with the Vestapol video "Legends of Old-Time Music" (Vestapol 13026), which features footage of Tommy Jarrell, Clarence Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, Doc Watson, Sam McGee and others.

Cheers!

[deleuran]

I will not go into a discussion about what Old time is. It can be read elsewhere. And you allready have a link to wikipeda, which has a very good descripsion.
But I will tell a little story that maybe illustrates some of the differences between Old time and bluegrass.
In september me and the band I play in were at an anual gathering of dancers and old time musicians, that is held a weekend every year in september by DAFF, Danish American Folkmusic Society. There are musicians mostly from Denmark and some from Sweden, and this year we had a fine american band, Troublesome Creek Stringband. The differnt bands played for squaredance through the weekend, and in between there were jams all over the place, and you could just sit in and play along, without anybody bothering about it.
I met, and beame friendly with a swedish banjoplayer. We jammed and exchanged som songs, and our e-mail adresses as well, and afterwards we have corresponded some.
I didn' know, but he later told me, that he had been in the bluegrassmiljeu in Sweden for 20 years, and had worked on arranging festivals for many years. He is responsibel for the booking of bands to something called Nääsville bluegrass and old time festival.
He told me, that he'd had more fun during that weekend than he'd had for the last ten years in bluegrass.
He added, that bluegrass often could be compared to fight sports, like who's biggest, who's fastest, who's best, and if you play a solo on the guitar for instance, you'll be compared to a recording with Tony Rice, or some other bigger and better players. Instead of being judged on your own premicies. And at festivals, you can be frozen out, ignored og not allowed to participate in jams if you are not "good enough".
Hes experience of the DAFF gathering was, that it was much more social, better vibes, and you could join in jams and participate with whatever skills you have, which makes it a very pleasant and 'human' experience.
Also the fact that you don't play individual solos, like in blugrass, takes some of the competitionpart out of it. When there is improvisation, it's more like a collective improvisation, like we know it from the old New Orleans jazz.

I'd like to hear if others have similar or different experiences on this subject.

[Ptarmigan]

Interesting deleuran. I must say I've played in hundreds & hundreds of Irish sessions over the years & without a doubt, the ones I liked least of all, were those where there was an element of competition.
I reckon traditional/folk music should be more about everyone joining in, whatever level, & less about who is better than who!

This is the way I see it:

In Bluegrass the PLAYER is King.

In Old Time the TUNE is King.

Me, I like playing tunes.

If I wanted competition I'd take up running fast!

Cheers
Dick

[deleuran]

Yeah, in old time the tune is king. I can relate to that. Amen
In our little band we see it like this, both when we rehearse, record and play for an audience. It's not the individual performance, but the overall picture that counts.
It's how the four instruments sound together, and then we're back with the tune I guess?

[bagofnerves]

JACK LEWIS AT TH OLD SURBER STATION RADIO HAS A GOOD EPISODE OF HIS POD CAST WHICH TRIES TO ILLUSTRATE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OLDTIME AND BLUEGRASS

[Ptarmigan]

Hey, that sounds interesting.
I'd like to check that out.
Do you have a link for it?

Cheers
Dick

P.S. I found it! ;D

JACK LEWIS - OLD SURBER STATION RADIO

[bagofnerves]

Hi Dick HOPE you enjoyed surber satation, HE ALSO HAS A GOOD CHRISTMAS EPISODE FOR ANYBODY WHO NEEDS CHRISTMAS MATERIAL

[haiku]

Mike Seeger wrote an interesting essay on Old-Time music on his website:
mikeseeger.info/html/oldtime.html

Great infos there too!

[Ptarmigan]

Yes Haiku, I actually start off my own Old Time page by quoting Mike's excellent page.

Goodness only knows why I forgot to post this important link above.

Anyway, it's there now - thanks.

Cheers
Dick

[john]

Hi there,
In my opinion a cutting contest can be very good if the musicians
are equally good. But to play music and having fun doing that you dont have be a Larry Rice, Bela Fleck ect.
The music is in front and we are all kings in the moment the tune goes up to a higher level. A nice rush!!
Many times have I heard a average band play and perform better than a hot pro due to the fact that the average band are using all they can give individually to make it swing and the hot is hot but many times they forget that there is an audience present. I find many new bluegrass bands boring because they play at the same speed and then the tunes sounds after awhile the same.
Yes, the melody is the king and can you add something good and interesting to it thats fine. At festivals and jams a.s.o sit down and learn while playing your thing. One step at a time you will become better and better. And remember, once you have become the master give room in a jam for the new one. We have all started from scratch.
In a jam session remember to play something that people know!
It is not very polite to invite to a jam and then play your own stuff.
Makes the rest look like fools when they are standing there and trying to find the right cords for the song or tune. And I have seen many new ones in bluegrass and old time slowly back out from the jam, pack their instrument and we have never seen them again.
So, make room when it is all right to do so and have fun.
John

[deleuran]

Amen.

[john]

Oh, by the way
In bluegrass it is normal as it is in New Orleans Jass that some of the musicians take a solo after the main theme has been played or sung or what ever. But you dont have to do it all the time.
If you are a 5 piece band and all are taking solos in every number. Well, it can be a long evening.

[Ptarmigan]

Yes I've seen that solo business at my son Kevin's Jazz gigs & it can really be fun, hearing how each musician in turn puts their own individual stamp on a tune.

I'm not so keen on the notion that you HAVE to clap after each solo though & prefer it when folks only clap when they're really touched or moved by someone's solo.

In our Irish Trad sessions we sometimes get a crowd of tourists who just clap after every effort, which becomes very boring & a little annoying by the end of the night.
In contrast, a local audience might never clap all night, or they might clap once or twice when they really liked a set of tunes. A much more honest approach to showing appreciation I feel.

That constant clapping makes me think of those TV shows where a stage hand lifts cards saying CLAP, CHEAR, SIGH etc etc ... & people actually, like a bunch of sheep, do what those little cards tell them! Which sounds almost as bad as that canned laughter they stick to those awful TV situation comedies, which must be some of the worst progs on TV these days!

Well, that's my moan for the day, over! sigh! ;D

The fact is, getting back to solos, that in Irish Trad as in Old Time, everyone just plays the tune together all the way through & I think this is probably why I like the Old Time format of - one in, all in. I think it's stressing that the tune is the most important element, not the individual players technique.

Having said that, if I ever found myself in a session with some really top notch Old Time players, I wouldn't be playing anyway, I'd just be listening, but also, being selfish, I would also hope to hear them strut their funky stuff in a solo or two.

Well, shucks, rules are there to be broken, aren't they?

Cheers
Dick

[john]

well, in modern jazz you dont clap you just snap your fingers!!!!!!!

[otjunky]

Just to add a bit of an alternate point of view...

I guess there's no denying that the term "Old Time Music" has come to refer the what's was played in the Appalachian Mountain chain of the South Eastern US. Most of the "collectors" were form the Eastern regions though there were some notable exceptions. And most of the early recordings were made in that regions - though, again, there are some notable exceptions.

The introduction of Clawhammer banjo into the regions around North Carolina, Southern West Virginia, and Eastern Tennesee after the Civil war had a dramatic effect on may aspects of the music - including the introduction of synchopation that altered some of the fiddle styles and the 5th string "pop" that again imparted a unique characteristic to Appalachian fiddling as the local fiddlers tried to emulate it.

While the string band sound that comes from this region - and the fiddle style needed to play with the Clawhammer banjo in such a band - have come to define "Old Time Music", it's probably worth mentioning that OT fiddling in the U.S is much broader than that.

Prior to the Civil war - and before the introduction of the Clawhammer banjo - fiddlers and their families had already migrated West into Texas and Arkansas, then up into Missouri bringing with them whatever fiddle styles were played before the Clawhammer banjo came on the scene. Even today, it's rare to find a Clawhammer banjo player in these regions.

Similarly, the fiddlers in Georgia and other parts of the South outside the mountain were not much influenced by Clawhammer banjo playing. Charlie Poole didn't play clawhammer style and neither did Fate Norris with the Skillet Lickers.

Synchopation was also important to the evolution of fiddling in these regions outside the Appalachian mountains but it came with the advent of Ragtime - not with banjo playing.

It's common here in the US for OT fiddlers on the East Coast to believe that the Appalachian fiddle styles are the "oldest" and "most authentic" form of American fiddle playing when, in fact, some of it may be the result of "recent" development needed to accomodate the Clawhammer banjo in the second half of the 19th century.