Having recently read the book by Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, I have been thinking of my own life in terms of the music I have learned throughout it. This thought process got started last weekend when I pulled my dusty mountain banjo out of its case for a jam session at a friend's house. Hadn't played the thing in at least one, maybe two years, and yet, my fingers remembered the few little Appalachian-flavored tunes I learned some 35 years ago. Clumsy and slow, but definitely still accessible from the muscle memory banks, the songs brought forth a flood of memories of the days living in Ohio where I learned them.
I was a young college student, a transplant from New York, studying first Music Therapy and then Cello Performance at Ohio University, ending up, finally, with the Music Education degree that has served me so well this last decade and a half. Athens, the home of OU, sits at the southeast corner of the state, at the edge of the Appalachian Mountains and region. Such a place, I found, was home to a whole new kind of music I had never heard before. Not bluegrass, but something more raw and simple that appealed to me right away and made me want to learn.
There was an Anthropology professor in those days, Art Saxe, who lived with his wife, Susan, on a 40-or-so acre farm at the top of a knobby hill in Millfield, once a coal mining town about 15 miles from Athens. Art had befriended some of the local musicians, some of us students, and also some hippies that lived down the road from him. During the first summer I lived there, we would gather in Art's living room to drink homemade wine and beer and play music together. He knew- it seemed- hundreds of these mountain songs, and sang them with gusto while thumping on a banjo made from the torque converter of -I think- an old Plymouth. I would bring a fiddle along and he patiently taught me what he knew. I learned that I needed steel strings, not the silver wound gut or synthetic that I had been using. I also learned that I needed to flatten my bridge out, the better to play on two strings at once.
I got hooked up with this group of musical friends in the spring when I had cat-sat at a friend's apartment in town over spring break. Her apartment had a window that opened on to a roof where I would play my fiddle in the open air. This was a fiddle that I had borrowed from a boy, an English major, on whom I had a desperate crush. He and I joined together with another boy and formed a band that played Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan and Jonathan Prine songs around town. I had started learning a few fiddle tunes by this time and they were always the hit of any gig. But I was still thinking bluegrass and the mountain style hadn't quite sunk in yet.
So here I was on a sunny spring day, playing fiddle on a roof, and a young man appeared in the alley and shouted up to me "Don't go away, I'll be right back!" And back he came with a guitar. He introduced himself -Lucien Geoffrey Matte- and we shared tunes and jammed the rest of the afternoon away. Soon he introduced me to his friend, David Kuhaneck who played clawhammer banjo in the frailing style of Appalachia, and I was hooked. It was through these two new friends that I became a regular at Art Saxe's summer night gatherings.
The night air of summer in Appalachia is like nothing else I have ever experienced anywhere. It is dense with the sound of night insects, the twinkle of fireflies, the buzz of hunting night hawks and the condensation of the day's humidity. Between songs, the space between the musicians filled up with this mix, making a continuous, velvety fabric of sound, smells and fecund too much-ness. Learning the songs here wasn't like learning music in school. The songs kept coming, and I had to grab what I could as they flew by. Consciousness altered with beer and other substances, I felt like a goldfish finding the castle all over again in his little bowl. Every time, every song unremembered until so many songs went by so many times, finally some of them stuck.
Chickens a-crowin' on Sourwood Mountain
Hay, dang dang, diddle aylee dang,
So many pretty girls, I just can't count 'em
Hay dang dang, diddle aylee dang.
Or
Old Molly Hare
What're you doin' there?
Sittin in a corner
Smokin' a cigar.
Or
Oh the cuckoo
She's a pretty bird
She warbles when she flies
She don't ever holler cuckoo
Till the fourth of July
Sometimes, returning home at daybreak, the mist settling into the hollows in gauzy wisps seemed like a reflection of the sleepy dreams of music in my head.
The next fall, Art was in the hospital for a while, I forget what for, but Susan made him a tape to listen to of all the versions of his favorite song, Ragtime Annie, that he had on various records. That is one song of those many that I learned and learned well, and play to this day, in the version that Art himself taught me. Won second place in the fiddle contest at Julian a few years back with that song.
The Appalachian Mountains are far away and Art is probably long retired and moved to Florida or something by now, but those tunes are in me still, and can still fill me up, just like a hot summer evening on a steamy mountain top.
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