Fiddle Jam

On the joys found in making folk music together

I remember going on a fall hayride when I was very young. Dark gray clouds rolled over a wooded Kentucky holler. A tractor pulled a gaggle of kids on a wagon. An old man sang lustily, his voice rough and free.

I’m pretty sure there was a fiddle at that event. I know I heard one at other outdoor venues in the Bluegrass State and in Ohio, where I finished my high school years. We heard Jay Ungar and Molly Mason play “Ashokan Farewell” under early mid-summer stars at the Lancaster Festival. More recently, fiddles entranced us at a Civil War reenactment we attended in our town in Minnesota (sadly, that event no longer exists).

The early American folk songs the Civil War group played were comfortingly familiar to me. Ever since my mother found Wee Sing America, patriotic tunes as well as ones sung during the years of western expansion became part of my childhood’s soundtrack, the music of our long car rides across the Midwest. Then, reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books and reading the lyrics to Pa’s songs linked fiddle music to real, live history. I’ve enjoyed listening to Cherry Jones read the books and, particularly, sing the songs of the Ingalls family and the American pioneer west. These are the sounds of our cultural heritage, and they are dear to me.

Several weeks ago, my memories and love of American folk music came back when the kids’ new-to-them violin teacher, Ana, invited us to a fiddle jam. “Other students and I will be playing fiddle, my dad plays the banjo, and there will be other musicians there, too,” she told us. What a frolic to cherish this music and ease into fall, I thought. So a bunch of us piled into the van to drive out to a nearby acreage.

What is a fiddle jam? Basically, it’s an informal gathering of musicians who play folk music together. Usually there’s a leader—in our case, Ana—who helps facilitate tuning, the songs that will be played, if and when anyone plays a solo, and basically makes sure things are organized and smooth. There are different rules of etiquette to follow depending on the gathering; here’s one explanation of what participants might look for. But the informal rules are not difficult to understand. The point is to enjoy making music with others in a live setting.

That Saturday, we arrived at a picturesque house with a big front porch at the end of a dirt road. The sun shone brilliantly on horses in a corral and through the big windows facing the mountain. Kids spilled out of vehicles with instrument cases, and I realized our kids could’ve brought theirs, too. But since they hadn’t started learning to play fiddle music yet, we were enthusiastic listeners.

The view out the front door.

We met Ana’s dad, Kim, and other friends in the house. As the squawks of bows on strings sounded while Ana helped kids tune, I saw that some adults had come, too, to play guitar and banjo. Guitar! I’ve had one since college, but I haven’t touched it much in recent years. I realized that this might be an excuse to pick it up again—to learn with my own children.

The players sat in the living room in a big circle, with the youngest early elementary fiddle players near Ana and strung out in chairs and a couch in a semi-circle. The banjo and guitar players finished the circle. We listeners sat around a kitchen table just adjacent to the musicians, looking toward them and a gorgeous mountain view out the front window. Ana gave a brief introduction to all of us, including parents and other kids, and said which book the musicians would be using. She named a song, people flipped pages and set the books on stands, and they were off, players jumping in according to his or her ability.

So many times in musical study, the onus of practice is heavy. You can’t mentally and physically master an instrument—or even sound a note—without lots and lots of right repetition. Learning notes is aural, visual, and physical (stand this way, put your hand here, elbow out, push your fingers on this spot, etc). All the accouterments of tempo and style pile upon the muscle memory required to learn an instrument, be it voice or piano or guitar or fiddle. It can be very intimidating, then, to sing or play in front of others, just considering the technical ability required for basic proficiency. That’s not even considering the sheer musicality that makes music music, what makes it beautiful and enjoyable.

I remember the first time I volunteered to sing in public outside of church. It was a special day at our Kentucky school, called something like “Old Fashioned Days,” and a dad who played a guitar had our fourth-grade class sitting in a circle while he played folk tunes. When he asked if someone wanted to sing “Dixie,” I shyly raised my hand. I’d learned it from my father, who probably learned it from his mother, my grandmother, who was originally from Arkansas. He would sing it or play it on the harmonica (yet another folk instrument). This was before all the woke stuff, the tearing down of Confederate statues, and I had no idea of all the political connotations associated with the song. I just liked the tune and its full-throated loyal yearning for a long-distant home. So I warbled it out and felt the flush of pleasure of making music with someone else, in a little appreciative group.

In this fiddle jam, you could feel the mutual pleasure of shared practice and community. The great thing about a fiddle jam is that it is fun, and it is a way for musicians of all abilities to work together to make music. New learners can sometimes stall out at the point when they should perform because singing or playing all by themselves can feel terrifying and be a literal barrier to the very reason people learn in the first place: to share music with others. But a jam is friendly. It can include truly excellent instrumentalists like Ana, who has won state and regional fiddle competitions, and also first graders still mastering basic note-reading, and a bunch of music appreciators in between. The “jump in, jump out” format makes it easy for those less able or confident in their abilities to ease into making music, going all the way through songs and not just practicing certain intervals or parts like they would do in private practice sessions. Here, like a yellow leaf drifting onto the waters of a sunny dappled creek under a bright blue autumn sky, newer musicians were carried gently along by others.

Our view from the table. I loved how my son was so at ease, just listening.

And that’s what we were, too—carried along on the stream of song with these players, sawing or plucking or strumming away. It was a treat to watch kids with their brows furrowed in concentration, the smiles of pleasure of others, the laughter when a certain riff sounded good or even a bow squawk or finger flub accidentally happened. During one piece, “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” another mom leaned over and told me how Ana disliked the song, mostly because her dad Ken loved it and wanted to play it all the time. But she played it anyway, because she loves her dad and the jam. We giggled as we saw kids almost hitting each other with their bows, not because they were being malicious but because they were sitting so close together.

And wouldn’t you know it? Though the song, like all the others, certainly wasn’t polished, the music was lively and a pleasure to listen to. I realized that this was precisely because the players mutually agreed to play together for the sheer joy of it. You can listen to a clip of the song and our murmuring here:

---

This Substack has been quiet lately. I haven’t written consistently, mostly because I’ve been drowning in school year life and in other obligations I’ve taken on (more on that another time). Sometimes I find that writing, however familiar the craft is and has been to me, can be intimidating to approach again after a break. And I’ve realized this uneasy discomfort, the hesitation in writing again, is similar to the way making music is. The less familiar it is, or the longer you go without tuning up, pulling out note-covered sheets, and just jumping in, the harder it can be to restart, or to even practice at all.

But writing about this fiddle jam has allowed me to reenter the stream, both here and with my own musical playing. As I was writing this, one of my sons walked by and asked about the fiddle book near me. Before I knew it, I was opening the guitar case and showing him how to play some simple chords for “Old Joe Clark” (you can see and hear a version of it here). “Every room in old Joe’s house was filled with chicken pie!” I sang. He grinned. Then he wanted to try, so he sat with the guitar and messed around with the strings.

A new try.

Then our younger daughter wanted to try “Rubber Dolly” on the violin. Then the new guitar player wanted to get out his violin and try the same song. So I took the guitar back, they grabbed a music stand, and we all jumped in where we could, a little haltingly, with little smiles. The lamps warmed the room while the darkness inked the windows behind us, and the bows sang with the reverbing chords of the guitar.

And just like that, it was another fiddle jam.