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American Music Legacy: An Old Time Experience |
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Time:
The second week of August, 1980. Place: Galax Virginia, a rural
community in the Blue Ridge Mts. just across the North Carolina border
and east of Tennessee. I had traveled there with some friends to attend
the 45th Annual Old Fiddler’s Convention, a bluegrass and
old time music festival that attracts thousands of musicians each year,
who compete for prizes in fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin, dobro,
dulcimer, autoharp, flatfoot dance, folk song, and last but not least
old time band and bluegrass band competitions. Those who weren’t
on stage, or lined up to get on stage, or watching from the audience,
were jamming at campsites spread out across the 20-acre park that is
used as a horse farm during the rest of the year. While there were many
musicians much older, I was surprised by the high number of people who
were around my age. I was twenty years old at the time, and had been
playing guitar for a few years, but I was just starting to learn to
fiddle, and had no idea it was so popular with my own generation. We went to visit an old fiddler named Tommy Jarrell, who lived not far away in the town of Toast, NC. I had never met him before, but I knew that he was in his eighties, and I imagined he would be just like any of the oldest people I’d ever known, all of whom were either very ill, or kind of quiet and uninterested in doing much, so my expectations about him were pretty low. We were welcomed into his home as if we were long lost family he’d never seen before, and were soon playing tunes in his backyard. It took me a little while to get used to his southern accent, but soon I was completely overwhelmed by the man’s liveliness and humor. Don’t get me wrong, Tommy wasn’t young, and he wasn’t trying to act young. But he was “alive” in the fullest sense of the word. He fiddled with an exciting, animated bowing style, almost dancing in his seat, and he sang songs in a strong voice that sounded every bit |
as worn as the
antique instrument he held in aged hands. At times his humor was too
subtle for us younger “kids”, a fact I realized years later as I
listened to the cassette tapes I made during our visits. Sometimes we
inadvertently spoke to him as if he was hard of hearing, or a little
slow to understand, but now I believe that he heard us just fine, and
only acted that way sometimes to fool us. I really enjoyed playing tunes
with him. That was a landmark experience for me and I’m sure many of the other younger musicians who visited Tommy (it seems there were thousands) over the years were affected the same way. I came away with a new attitude about old age, and a different outlook on my own life. Sure, there are things worth doing while you’re young that you might later feel regrets about for not having tried, but life is always worth living, and making the most of it for as long as you can is what it’s all about.
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