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Old-time music is a thriving force in our part of the world. In the New River and Roanoke valleys alone, musicians and fans can find an old-time jam every night of the week For the past six years, local string band the Wild Turkeys has played a driving, fiddle-and-banjo-led sound at festivals and local venues. Recently they took some time to talk about their group, old-time music and the Carter Family. Can you tell me about your music? Frances West: Jim [Barnhill] plays guitar and sings, and plays banjo but not in the band. I’m the bass player and — make sure you get this ... Greg Galbreath: The autoharp player, she rocks on the autoharp. We forced her to play the autoharp. FW: We play Carter Family songs and we have to have it [the autoharp]. . . One day [Jim] said, "Wouldn’t it be great if someone played the autoharp?" and I got the short straw. And I play banjo, but not in the band. GG: Everybody in the band plays banjo. Cindy Cook: I play fiddle and sing. GG: And I play banjo. You’re the main banjo guy. GG: Yeah, and I’ve been forced to sort of learn to play some guitar on some of the Carter Family tunes. FW: And Greg and I holler. GG: I have one note I sing on one song. What is old-time music? FW: It’s traditional mountain music. GG: Southern Appalachian mountain music. FW: English-Scottish-Irish-based with the African banjo thrown in. GG: Fiddle music from England came over and mixed with the banjo, syncopation and rhythm, and it kind of combined. FW: And it’s different from region to region. CC: You go over the mountain and it’s completely different sounding. Southwest Virginia was big on barn-raising, so it’s very much dance music. West Virginia’s real spooky, because people played alone. Jim Barnhill: Can you define it as a religion? CC: I think it’s a gene you have. You either like it or you don’t. FW: It speaks to you or it doesn’t. GG: It’s a pretty simple music form really, nothing fancy. Chris Burcher (from local band American Roots), called it "the original trance music." GG: It is. CC: Oh that’s beautiful. FW: It’s big in Ithaca, N.Y. They have their own sound and they take it even more toward trance. It’s musicians’ music. It’s players’ music. GG: Yeah, most people who like old-time music play it. FW: Or at least you dance. How’s the local scene? FW: The Blacksburg scene is noted for being very friendly and inclusive and nurturing. GG: There’s some scenes, like the Asheville [N.C.] scene, where you get more of the real good players, and there’s more exclusivity. You wouldn’t want to jam with those people. CC: They call them closed-shoulder jams, where you only see the backs of people. Where does old-time music come from? FW: We should really say something about the Carter Family. JB: Well, it was 1928 when they got together for the Bristol recordings — or 1927 — something thereabouts. And it was just the three of them, a husband and wife and a sister-in law. And they got famous along with Jimmie Rodgers. [Alvin Pleasant] Carter, who was kind of the leader of the band, he didn’t write too many of the songs — he wrote maybe two or three. Most of the songs he got he went on these hunts all around the Tennessee and North Carolina and Virginia area, and he would find these songs. He had a musician — a real musician — come along with him, since they didn’t have any tape recorders. [They] would find these songs and bring them back, and the group — which was Sara, Maybelle [Addington Carter] and A.P. — would work these songs up and try to play them as well as they had heard. So he did a great service — it cost him his marriage — but he did a great service to us all, because he selected all these songs that would have been lost. CC: And recorded hundreds of them. FW: So you’ll hear a lot of people say it’s a Carter Family song, and although they didn’t write it, it’s attributed to them because basically they were probably the first to record it. So, what is the place of originals in old-time? On your (self-titled) CD, do you include originals? FW: There’s no such thing in old-time . . . Well, like the [Lonesome Sisters], they write songs, but they write them with the feel and sound of old mountain ballads and old country. They’re not old-time though. GG: But most old-time people do the traditional tunes. It’s more like you interpret them in different ways. That’s the continuing tradition. Some people write new stuff, but it’s mostly reinterpreting the old traditional tunes. So where do you find your material? From recordings or from written music? FW: No, no, you don’t read music in old-time. CC: It’s really an oral tradition. FW: Ideally you learn from the old-timers if you can find them. GG: That’s the purest way, from the old-timers or from the old 78s, but you also can learn at fiddlers’ conventions. FW: When we’re at these festivals, you try to hunt down the old-timers to sit with them. GG: There’s really an emphasis put on getting as close to the source as you can . . . We’re pretty traditional, but you can’t really help but to put your own spin on it. |
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