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I moved from Boulder, Colorado, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1987. The tenure track took my Dad, and my family, from one college town to the next.
My dad learned how to play the banjo in the Seventies, when the folk revival hit Boston. And he kept playing in Boulder. In Chapel Hill, in the South, traditional music was everywhere. And he couldn't've been happier. Once a week, he'd host a jam session at our house. When I was six, I'd lie awake, listening to my dad and his friends play string-band music in our living room downstairs. From my room, through the air duct, I could hear them laughing, and talking, and singing. There was a social aspect to the music that I desperately wanted to be a part of.
When I started elementary school, my mom signed me up for classical violin lessons. (She never shared my dad's enthusiasm for old-time music, the precursor to bluegrass). I dutifully learned scales and arpeggios, and suffered through etudes. Eventually, I began to try my hand at some of those songs I overheard my dad playing. When he heard me, sawing away at "Old Joe Clark," he grabbed his banjo and joined. He was instantly excited. …turned out I had a good ear, and I could learn new tunes pretty quickly. Our shared interest in music brought us together.
We used to sit around the house, listening to old vinyl records and field recordings. During summer vacations, he and I would travel to fiddlers' conventions, in small towns like Mt. Airy, and Galax.
At fiddlers' conventions, musicians play informally, with friends who drive in from all over the country. At night, the campsites are filled with banjo players and fiddlers, swapping songs, lyrics, and stories, by the glow of propane lanterns. It's an annual pilgrimage for many musicians. The Mt. Airy festival is always on the first weekend in June, for example. In my house, my dad marked the date on our calendar with indelible ink.
It was in Mt. Airy, that I met Jim Reed, a retired West Virginia coal miner. I was twelve. Like me, Jim had learned how to play the fiddle and the guitar from his father. At the festival, he heard me play a song his father had played, forty years earlier. I'd learned it from an old recording, from the Library of Congress. He asked me if I wanted to jam.
We sat on folding chairs and played music for most of the afternoon. He asked me how I got into old-time music, and why I liked it. My answers probably weren't very profound. It was fun. It was different. It was something I did.
When we parted ways that afternoon, Jim thanked me. I was taken aback. Like every folk tradition, old-time music needs people to keep it alive, he said. I haven't forgotten that.
From then on, I played the fiddle with a new sense of importance. Jim gave me a musical mission almost. Ten years later, he and I are still good friends. In a sense, Jim brought me into the old-time-music fold on that June afternoon. For the first time, I took real ownership of the songs I was playing. And put them in a larger, historical context.
When I moved to New York, five years ago, I worried that I wouldn't have many opportunities to play the fiddle. I was mistaken. After a couple of months, I found a small community of young musicians, and we formed a rollicking string band. Their parents introduced them to old-time music, and we play it with a shared sense of importance. For me, the folk tradition I learned about from Jim continues to thrive, in New York, some six-hundred miles from my home.