Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

15. Easy Street

— 142 — 15 EASY STREET During the early 1970s, the jam session was the defining act of old-time music revival. For beginning musicians, it could be a formative event, an epiphany that could carry a new musician into the vivid presence of old-time music’s most deeply held values. At a festival, a few people playing together could quickly swell to a hundred as musicians—who might well be strangers to one another—brought out their instruments, tuned to a prevailing pitch, and played along on some common tune. Artifacts of this period—Miles Krassen’s instruction books and recordings such as those by the Fuzzy Mountain String Band—announced and defined the ethos and technology of musical community. In some circles, Fuzzy Mountain was even distinguished as a “repertoire band,” a term noting their emphasis on their stock of common tunes rather than on the band as a performing entity. Soon after these influences had taken hold, a new and distinctive sound swept over the old-time revival like a fever: the energetic and charismatic style of the Highwoods Stringband. Unlike Fuzzy Mountain , Highwoods made its mark through extensive concert and festival touring. Word quickly spread through the revival of their stirring performances , and followers were drawn irresistibly to their unique musical — 143 — Easy Street Jam session at a potluck preceding a Highwoods Stringband concert, 17th Street Park, 1977. Seated, from left, Bob Potts of Highwoods (fiddle), Tom Carter, Blanton Owen, David Molk (fiddle), unknown. Photo by the author. style and with it their picturesque and romantic lifestyle. Highwoods concerts were simply a feast of new ideas for the revival, infusing brilliant showmanship and musicianship with the deepest sentiments of old-time revival and youth culture. Bloomington dancers recalled several visits to Indiana, the first to Madison in 1973. Steve Hinnefeld was part of a carload of dancers who made the two-hour drive to their concert. In 1974 they performed at the Indiana University Fine Arts Auditorium, in 1975 at the Monroe County Library, and in 1978 at Hunter School. The Hunter School venue was a dance event, promoted with special flyers, which would not have been the case for most traveling bands who played for the Bloomington dance. Although they later relocated to the Finger Lakes region of New York, Highwoods members attribute much of the ethos of their band to a period some of them spent in the mid-1960s in Berkeley, California (Gerrard 1992: 27). This was a formative site for the counterculture, — 144 — Old-Time Music and Dance centered on an important campus fringe area of the University of California , where traditional music was being rediscovered as a repository of alternative values. Old-time music, it was determined, had an uncanny power for achieving ecstatic states of mind (no doubt likened to the effects of hallucinatory drugs) during intense jam sessions. But band members then had little money and performed on the street as buskers alongside circus acts, magicians, other musicians, and all sorts of street vendors who laid their wares out on blankets. This lent to music performance an urgent need for a different sort of intensity: to compete, they had to entertain. According to band member Mac Benford: The band grew out of a bunch of people who were playing old-time music on the streets in Berkeley and San-Francisco. We were playing to the tourists who knew squat about old-time music and what its real roots were, but there was something about the music that they liked, just simple as that. To hear it was uplifting somehow, so we had to emphasize things like its humor, its energy, sometimes its strangeness —those more universal qualities that it has. The ecstasy that we achieved became our trademark, the thing that we could use to make an impact. It came out of the music and spread around to everybody. We were able to emphasize the spiritual energy of the music, which made it possible for us to affect equally audiences who had grown up with old-time music and those who had never heard it before. (Gerrard 1992: 29) But Highwoods members did not exactly invent this attitude. By the time they began performing, old-time record reissue companies were releasing the vaudeville-like skits of highly regarded traditional performers such as Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers and Fiddlin’ John Carson with Moonshine Kate...