Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

6. The Old-Time Community

— 55 — 6 THEOLD-TIME COMMUNITY Bloomington’s music scene was changing at that time also. Miles began playing Irish music and was less involved in the dance. The recordings released on Rounder Records in 1972 and 1973 of the Fuzzy Mountain String Band from Durham, North Carolina, were having an impact nationwide. In Bloomington, their influence was all the greater when, a few years later, band members Tom Carter and Blanton Owen enrolled in the Folklore Institute. They occasionally attended dance group events and played music with local musicians. The Fuzzy Mountain recordings were numbers 10 and 35 in the catalog of a new Massachusetts-based company which marketed directly to the old-time music revival with recordings of the most popular bands. Rounder also had reissue and traditional releases, but, unlike County, it promoted young old-time bands from the beginning and in the same series as their traditional material. The company made explicit contributions to the revival in its celebration of the aural style of revival bands and in its depiction—in narrative liner notes and vivid cover photography—of old-time revival lifestyle. Fuzzy Mountain took a different approach to old-time music revival than did the New Lost City Ramblers, at the time the best-known — 56 — Old-Time Music and Dance prototype for old-time performance. Where the Ramblers had looked primarily to vintage recordings for material, members of Fuzzy Mountain visited living traditional musicians in their region who in their youth were contemporaries of the classic string band performers. As the band coalesced out of informal jam sessions, a distinct focus emerged: “playing mostly personally collected old-time Appalachian tunes, and playing them ‘right’—as the source played them” (Hicks 1995: 21). Tune collecting became an integral part of the band’s accumulation of its repertoire, with practice sessions devoted to introducing the “newest gem” from a field tape or to perfecting the style from an older one. The liner notes to their recordings paid scrupulous tribute to the traditional source (and sometimes the source’s source) of each tune, sometimes by recounting the circumstance of its learning: “we have . . . learned our tunes from the traditional fiddlers in person, through many visits to their homes and to the countless fiddlers conventions which are held from Easter to Thanksgiving throughout this part of the country.” If the effect of this was to nurture a respect for living traditional musicians, it also began to describe the contours of an old-time music revival community. As Fuzzy Mountain members put it, they were “part of a larger group of friends . . . who share a love of traditional dance music.” Cover photos depicted them as young people with an unassuming back-to-the-land appearance. Their musical style was entirely unintimidating , featuring restrained tempos and modestly ornamented melodies typical of field recording or jam session performance. The sense of community they projected was amplified by the fact that the band never toured and seemed on the recordings to exude a studied disregard for the theatricality of performance. The recordings were noticeably informal, with different personnel for most every track; the first album was recorded live with mike inputs Y-ed down to two channels. The band also appeared to have only a loosely determined sense of membership—they seemed more a group of friends than a “band,” in the conventional sense of the term. In fact, the group emerged first from a regular open jam session. Although they restricted participation in practice sessions after they began recording, there was a vivid atmosphere of community, with a coterie of listeners at the twice-weekly jam sessions and periodic holiday parties (Hicks 1995: 21). — 57 — The Old-Time Community Jam sessions were the quintessential act of old-time community. They were infinitely expandable, presupposed no standing social or political structure, and could be convened almost anywhere with little effort. Although musical individualism could be expressed in them, jam sessions were distinguished from other musical events by repetition, synchronization , and egalitarian participation. They adapted easily to physical and social spaces, both indoor and outdoor, and had no official beginning or end. Seated or standing postures were directed inward, toward a musical and spiritual center where no listener ever sat. If there were listeners, they were on the outside, seemingly superfluous to the performance. A single thirty-two-bar tune might go on ten or twenty...