Articles and Stories

THE ROMANCE OF THE KENTUCKY FIDDLER

To love Kentucky fiddling is to have a romance with the past. It is music that is intimately tied to the land and a rural way of life that has now mostly disappeared, but lives on in the colorfully named tunes and equally colorful characters who have passed them down to us. For most people in the 1990's, however, the days when rural fiddling was still passed down through the generations as a living tradition seem very remote and long ago. The few fiddlers who survived into the late twentieth century and grew up in that tradition are looked upon with reverence, for they are survivors of a straightforward, unhurried world that has long ago been left behind by the fast pace of our society, and they have left us with our only clues into the mystery of where this music came from and what shaped it into its present form. There is much to be learned from their lives, because with their presence gone from the world, old time fiddling as a traditional art has passed some invisible point of no return. Now we learn from recordings, books, at camps, and at festivals. We can learn to play old time, Cajun, Irish, contest style. It is still traditional music, but it is no longer rooted in traditional culture. Fiddle music will never again be learned the way the old timers learned it - by absorbing it in the course of every day life.

When I was first learning about this music, there were still some old timers around in Kentucky and North Carolina who remembered back to those early days, when in most rural communities just about the only musical instrument people had was the fiddle. In those times, change happened very slowly from one generation to the next, and the fiddling styles were probably much like they were when the first settlers carried them across the waters. Those old timers are pretty much all gone now, and gone with them is a way of life that will never be seen again. Their world was a place where the past and present stood side by side, and I had the good fortune to share in their memoriesof that now long ago time and to witness the passing of an age. These were people born and raised in the agrarian days before automobiles and electricity, who experienced more social and technological upheaval than any other generation of people in history, yet who never forgot who they were or where they came from. They enthralled me with the nearly lost tunes and songs and their tales of the olden times, and filled me with a wildly romantic longing to keep those memories alive. Every long forgotten tune remembered, and every eccentric hitch of the bow learned, was a way of briefly stepping back into that time with those people and reclaiming a little bit of the grace and dignity that was always present in the old fiddle tunes played in the traditonal way.

So, I want to relate about where these tunes came from, because they have a long history and were passed down to us by real people whose lives, though lived out in rural obscurity, were filled with a richness that is rapidly disappearing from our present lives.Their musical traditions were inextrcably entwined with these people and their way of life, and when the old ways receded into the past, the old music faded away with them.

Kentucky author Harriette Simpson Arnow once wrote," My people loved the past more than their present lives, I think, but it cannot be said we lived in the past." And nowhere is this statement more true than when applied to the Kentucky fiddler. I have had the privilege of knowing a number of fiddlers from around the state who were born before or shortly after the turn of the last century, and they surely had one foot in the past and one in the present. They remembered in great detail growing up in the days before automobiles, televisions, telephones - electricity at all, for that matter - yet they seemed quite at ease living in the modern world. Still, the past was never far away. They seemed to have endless tales and reminiscences concerning the music and where it came from and who were the great players of olden times. Their reverence for the antiquity of the music and the fiddlers from past generations was always fresh in their minds. I remember many conversations about some old timer who had been dead for thirty years or more that ended with, "You remember him, don't you ?" As if I had been back there with him, or it had just happened last week.

Much of Kentucky in the 1970's and 80's was just such a mix of the past and the present, and by that time most of the traditional music had slipped quietly into the background of people's lives. As an Allen County fiddler, James Hood said, "A lot of them has quit. I know a lot of fiddlers I thought was better than anything you hear now. But they said that so many of 'em got playing different kinds of music, playing different styles, that they just quit. I've had lots of 'em to tell me that." And so, many times I strayed off the main roads as I roamed the state, to stumble onto a piece of the past that should no longer be there, yet somehow was. That was how in 1991, I met the eccentric ballad singer Pleaz Mobley, who had some brief notoriety in the 1960's performing at festivals with fiddler Clester Hounchel, before disappearing into obscurity. I had assumed him dead long ago. And that was how I met fiddler Sid Hudnall, who lived with his ancient mother in an isolated farmstead, called Happy Valley because there they had escaped the curse of civilization all their lives. And that was how in 1971 I met the sister of legendary fiddler Henry Bandy. Bandy was born in 1876 and died in 1952, but she insisted that if I wanted to know so much about him, I should just go ask him in person.

There is a great deal more to traditional Kentucky fiddling than just the tunes themselves. They are the romantic expressions of a world and a kind of people we will never know again. So let them tell you their stories about what it was like to know old time fiddling in a time gone by, and why the old Kentucky fiddle music was inseparable from the players lives and the lives of those who came before them. We'll begin where I began.

LUTHER STRONG

When I was first becoming aware of old time fiddle music, I heard some recordings of William "Billie" Stepp and Luther Strong, two of the finest eastern Kentucky fiddlers ever to be recorded. Their haunting and exciting renditions of classic pieces like Ways of the World , The Hog Eyed Man, and The Last of Callahan captivated me and surely were the beginning of my own romance with Kentucky fiddling. So of course I tried to find out more about them.

One evening I was visiting with Donald Goodman in Booneville, and he began to reminisce about Luther Strong. Donald had gone to school with Strong's son and knew that family quite well. It seems that there had been a legendery Owsley County fiddler Moab "Dude" Freeman, who was something of a vagabond. He wandered around eastern Kentucky like a hobo, even traveled out west and back, and was considered one of the finest fiddlers to ever live in that region. Donald said Strong played more like Freeman than anyone he ever heard, and he was sure that was where Strong learned to play. He said Strong had an extra long bow "and used every bit of it." Rumor had it that he put pennies under the feet of his bridge to get a keener sound, but Donald said he was there when Strong began that practice. He said they were at some local fiddlers contest, and Strong said he couldn't compete because the bridge was too low on his fiddle and the strings rubbed on the fingerboard. So Donald suggested placing pennies under the bridge to raise it up. It worked well, Strong went on to play Sally Goodin and win the contest, and he liked the pennies so much, that he just kept them there, saying, "It's just like Baby Bear, it's just right.” But who knows ? They say he was bad to drink from time to time, and a tale went around that when the Library of Congress came around in 1937 to record him, he had no fiddle at all, and they had to haul him out of jail and have him play on a borrowed fiddle.

Luther Strong died in 1963 . Twelve years later, I asked an elderly Knott County fiddler who had known Strong if he could play the Hog Eyed Man. He said, "I can play it, but if you want to hear it played right, you should go hear Luther Strong play it." I said, "But I thought Luther Strong was dead."

"No, he lives down here on the river in Hazard."

"Well, how long has it been since you've seen him ?"

He thought a moment and said, "It's been about twenty years, I guess."

PAT KINGERY

Pat Kingery was born in 1912. He lived most of his life in the little community of Nobob, in Barren County, Kentucky. As a boy he learned tunes from his mother's whistling, and from his uncle Jodie Matthews who came to visit occasionally from Wayne County farther east. As Pat grew older , he was influenced by many excellent local fiddlers, including the well-known Carver family, and Page Ellis, who represented Barren County in the regional contest sponsored by Henry Ford in the 1920's. Pat eventually played semi-professionally and was to be influenced by Tommy Jackson and other fiddlers around Nashville in the forties and fifties. He played for years around the southern part of Kentucky in a band called Pat Kingery and His Kentuckians. As a result, Pat had a large and varied repertoire, ranging from the rare local tunes to more modern radio music. He was one of the many fiddlers of his generation caught between the romance of the old traditions and the allure of professionalism. But he remembered vividly what it was that kept him attached to his roots:

"I had a hard way to go to get started. My daddy died when I was real little. There was nobody left but me and my mother and my brother. Back then, you made a quarter any way you could, and you could sell possum hides and stuff like that, you know. My dad used to trap, and we had some traps back here, so I set them traps out, caught some possums and stuff, two or three skunks one time. There was an old feller lived down across the way, bought furs. So one day I went to see the old man and take my furs to sell a few. I walked up on the front porch, and I heard something and I stopped. And I had never heard anything that sounded as pretty. Well, I forgot about being cold. I forgot about everything. I just stood there. By and by, he quit, and I knocked on the door, and he said, 'Come in.' And I went in. And he was sitting over in a chair in front of the fireplace, and he had this thing in his hands. And I never said, 'I got some furs,' nor nothing.

Said, 'What is that you got?' He said, 'That's a fiddle' And I said, 'Is that what I heard a while ago?' He said, 'Yep. Did you like it?' I said, 'I sure did.' He said, 'Well, I'll play you another one, then. Then we'll look at your hides.' So he set there and played When You and I were Young, Maggie. That was the first time I ever seen a fiddle or ever heard one. But it done something to me that I never could get rid of. It created a desire that some way, some how, I knew I had to play a fiddle."

"I was about nine years old then. So you know how they used to send out in the mail these Sears and Roebuck catalogs. My mother had one of them. And she had it spread on her lap. And turning the pages of that catalog, I seen a picture of a fiddle. And it drove me crazy. I wanted one, said I'm gonna get me one. Well, it must have been about this time of year (January), this magazine came out. It had an advertisement in it that said, 'Sell thirty packages of garden seed to get this violin.' I begged my mother to let me do that. And she finally agreed to it, sent off and got the seed. And of course the neighbors felt sorry for me. They bought 'em right off. And I sent it in, and I waited and waited and waited 'til it come. And it finally got here, the whole thing wasn't but about that long ( twelve inches). Just a little bitty toy. And that's what I started to learn to play the fiddle on."

"When I was about eleven years old, they let me have a few rows of tobacco across the tobacco patch. And I sold that tobacco. It brought twenty-eight dollars. And I got the Sears and Roebuck catalog and bought my first fiddle."

Pat's health was very poor. When I went to his house, he would drag himself up out of the bed and stand in the middle of the room, swaying back and forth, and play until he gave out. He knew I was interested in the older tunes and would think about them between times that I saw him, and try to play them for me when we got together. I guess he understood that this was his last opportunity to pass his music on. The last time I saw him was in 1976. His brother Edgar told me he had been put into the hospital in nearby Glasgow, so I went to see him there. I was leaving for the summer to work up north, and I pretty well knew I'd never see him again. As we parted, I told him, "I'll play one for you." He said, "I'd like that."

CHARLIE KESSINGER

There was a fiddler I only spent one evening with in 1974, but who left me with an unforgettable memory of a man from another age, living as a stranger in modern times.

Early in the spring of 1974, I would sit out on the porch of our house in Bowling Green, Kentucky playing fiddle and guitar with my brother. Every couple days, an elderly man would walk by and stop to listen a while. Finally, he introduced himself as Leonard Kessinger, and we stopped to visit with him. It turned out his father was a fiddler and he played guitar with him when he was a young man. So I arranged to go visit them at their homeplace in nearby Morgantown.

Charlie Kessinger was born in 1883, in Butler County. He learned to play fiddle and banjo from his father, who was born in 1857, when that part of Kentucky was still barely settled:

"Back then they'd talk about animals - strange animals that I didn't know much about in my time - and I've heard my dad...he said he had thirteen deer hung up in the smokehouse, like killing hogs. They was more widely scattered back in that time. Sometimes it'd be miles between neighbors. They had oxen back then instead of horses and mules, and that was way slower."

Charlie talked with great emotion about learning to play as a boy, and about the fiddlers he grew up around, all of whom he had long outlived:

"I learned first one tune, then another. And I used to be awful bad to whistle. All I had to do was hear them play. I'd get the tune and go to whistling it, and I learned it from my whistling. I was a wonderful whistler, but now I've got these old false teeth, I can't whistle at all with 'em."

"I played a tune for a long time before I knowed any name for it. My daddy caught it from an old crosseyed man whistling it. And we always called it Jud Dougherty's Tune. That was the old man's name. One of my neighbors wanted us to bring my violin one night and play somewhere. I began to play that, and he began singing right after me, Down in New Orleans. That was the name of it."

"I learnt Mckinley March andWhistling Rufus from Jim Wallace James. Taken all around, he was the best musician I ever seen. He couldn't use a bow, though, like my daddy could. My daddy could handle a bow the best of any fiddler I ever played with."

Old Tennessee - Lord I wish I had a good fiddler to play after that tune. I did love to pick that on a banjer.... That's been a long time ago. Been a lot of change in things since then. I used to have some of the finest fiddlers to play with when I was a young man. Five or six different ones, and they're every one dead."

At this point, he broke down and began to cry.

JOHN SALYER

In January, 1975, while working in Bowling Green, Kentucky, I met an old fiddler named Charlie Strong, who had grown up in Lee County, eastern Kentucky. During the course of one of my visits with him, he played a piece he had learned in his youth from an elderly Magoffin County fiddler named John Salyer. Charlie had worked in Magoffin back in the 1940's and made friends with Salyer's two sons Grover and Glen, visting them often at their home. He said John Salyer was one of the greatest fiddlers to ever come out of eastern Kentucky, but he refused to let his music be recorded. His children, wishing to preserve their father’s playing, had surreptitiously recorded him without his consent, and if I could locate them, they might let me hear him. This seemed a little bit far fetched, but then there was the case of Page Ellis, a fiddler from Barren County, Kentucky, who would never let anyone record him. So, a neighbor, Chester Huffman, had one of these record making machines, and he hid it behind the door while the old man played, and got him playing Forked Deer without him knowing. When Chester played the record for him to hear, he said, “By God, that feller plays more like me than any man I ever heard.”

I thought about John Salyer for some time, but couldn't locate an address for anyone in his family. After a number of fruitless letters mailed with little more address than Salyersville, Kentucky, I was finally put in touch with Grover Salyer, outside of Louisville. Grover had, indeed, recorded his father, but with permission. He somewhat reluctantly agreed to let me visit him and listen to the recordings, but said I could not have copies, writing an explanation for his reasons in this way:

"There were several old time fiddlers around who had come from old Virginia, where they had learned fiddle pieces which were brought over from the old world by the early settlers. My father learned many of these pieces. In 1941, I asked my father to make a recording of these pieces for future generations. At first, he refused, because of a disappointment he had had with two recording companies. My father finally agreed to play his pieces one time if I would promise never to let them get into the hands of a recording company, where they would profit from the musical skills of the great fiddlers of past times. This promise I made."

Afraid that if he allowed me to copy these recordings, they might somehow be exploited against his father's wishes, he would only let me visit and try to learn the tunes by listening over and over to the tapes he had dubbed off the original discs. I will never forget the first time he played one for me. Out of the speakers came Guilderoy (or Gilda Roy, as he spelled it), an old-world fiddle piece played in the classic, hauntingly beautiful solo style. I realized immediately that I was listening to the playing of an unknown master, and that I had found the music I wanted to learn to play myself. Luckily, Grover had learned to play a number of his father's pieces on the fiddle, and had made a point of learning to use the bow in the distinctive old fashioned mountain style of his father. He enthusiastically encouraged me to learn his family's music "right," often giving me the same advice his father had given him long ago. For instance, concerning phrasing:

"He had a motion, a hesitation. As you know, there's a hesitation to going from what we call the coarse to the fine (low strings to high strings). You just shift your bow. When we was playing, and I'd lose track of the tune, lose my timing, he'd say, 'Watch me when I do this....' "

Under these conditions, I began an apprenticeship with the Salyers that has lasted for more than twenty years. During that time I learned a great deal about this remarkable man. Although unknown outside his own region, he was a musical legend in central eastern Kentucky, and I had stumbled upon the rare occasion when a legend from the past could be brought to life. That he was was recorded for posterity is remarkable in itself, for home recording equipment was virtually non-existent in eastern Kentucky until the 1950's. But more important, few people even thought of recording their native music. It was simply a part of their everyday lives, and a part that was rapidly losing its meaning. John Salyer's grandson Buddy Salyer explained it in this way:

"As long as people in the mountains remained isolated, they held stubbornly to their music. But with the coming of roads, railroads, radios, electricity, and the movement of boys in the world wars, the introduction of outside influences proved too strong for the traditional form of entertainment."

John Salyer was a unique exception to this trend. He was a self-educated man with a strong sense of history and a deep pride in the knowledge that he was among the last carriers of an ancient fiddling tradition. A strong willed, often stubborn man, he was, like many eastern Kentuckians, suspicious of outsiders. Among his own people, however, he was affectionately known as "John Honey", because of his habit of addressing everyone as "honey." Those who knew him said he was the last man in his country to play the "old Irish" music, and he was aware that he was a caretaker of a great many old tunes that almost no one else remembered anymore.

And what tunes they were! Lacy Brown, named for the patriarch of the Brown clan who was murdered during a feud in the 1930's. Stump Tailed Dolly, named after John’s father Morgan’s dog Dolly. Polly Grand, an extremely rare and beautiful modal piece. The Brushy Fork of John's Creek, reputedly composed by one of Morgan's soldiers while camped on John's Creek in Pike County during the Civil War. Jack Wilson, named after a local character whose wife disfigured his face with a shotgun blast after a falling out. Flander's (Flannery's) Dream, handed down by fiddler Jim Flannery, who learned it in a dream from a bear that was chasing him through the wilderness while it played the fiddle. Muddy Creek, a direct descendent of the English country dance tune Newcastle. Lost Boy, a rare companion piece to the more commonly known Lost Girl.. Vance No More, The lament of Abner Vance, wriitten shortly before he was hanged for killing his daughters suitor. His repertoire was filled with history and local lore, and he vowed to take it to the grave with him rather than have this legacy exploited.

John's son Grover did, however, have the foresight and perseverence to preserve his father's music before it was gone. When, after years of deliberation, he finally agreed to share the family's recordings with the world, he gave us a window into a remarkable fiddle tradition that goes back hundreds of years, for the recordings of John Salyer reflect a substantial portion of the repertoire of a highly skilled traditional fiddler playing in his prime, and almost completely uninfluenced by music outside of his own region.

GUSTY WALLACE

Gustace "Gusty" Wallace was born in Hart County, Kentucky on November 24, 1890. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to neighboring Sulphur Well, where he lived for the rest of his life. His father was one of the most renowned old time fiddlers in that part of Kentucky, and Gusty was inspired by him to learn to play.

"My dad, his name was Addison. They called him Ad, you know. Ad's father went to kind of a musical one time. They was playing all these pieces...He says, 'I wish Ad was here.' - That was my daddy, you know - And they said, 'Why, Mr. Wallace, there's a lot of people here can play these pieces.' He says,'I know it, but there ain't none of 'em can give it that little whiff of the bow that Ad's got.' "

"I started playing at seven. My Dad would go to work and left the fiddle on the bed. I played it while he was at work. I played two or three little pieces before he knew it...Shortening Bread, Bound To Have a Little Fun..."

Gusty began to play for dances by the time he was twelve or thirteen and continued to do so all his life. In the 1930's, he fiddled professionally with the Bob Atcher Band in Louisville, and later on with the Prairie Ramblers in Des Moines, Iowa, hobnobbing with Clayton McMichen and Sleepy Marlin along the way. As a result, his repertoire and playing style ranged from the old local tunes to more modern rags and popular songs. However, Gusty spent most of his life in Sulphur Well, where aspiring fiddlers for miles around came to him for inspiration. I was told that Charlie Bush brought his young son Sam to learn from Gusty.

Gusty had a little shack out behind his house - his "music room" - where he could go and play for hours without disturbing his wife, Ella. We had many a long session there, interrupted only by the hour when the Lawrence Welk show came on. We would go in and sit with Ella, and Gusty would say,"Now, that's real music."

I learned a lot about fiddling from Gusty, and being only twenty years old, I also learned a lot about life. We were getting together regularly to play and record for some time, working out intricate arrangements of fiddle tunes with the banjo, but then I got into a busy time at school and didn't see him for several weeks. One day I received a letter from him which said, "We were doing so good together, and now you've quit me." Suddenly I realized that this old man was not just a fiddler, but a friend who counted on my company.

Gusty must have decided it was time for me to grow up, because not long after that we had another little run in. The Wallaces were Mormons, members of a Mormon Church settlement that had been in the area for a long time and endured no little friction with the other competing Christian denominations locally. Toward the end of one visit, Gusty went in the back room and came out with a Mormon Bible. He proceeded to begin my religious education for me, according to his point of view. I found the first excuse I could to tell him it was time for me to be heading home now, but he followed me to the car and continued his testimonial while I sat there with the engine running, too embarrassed to just cut him off and leave. Finally, enjoying himself immensely, he stopped and said, "Bruce, Do you think all I ever do is just sit around here and play the fiddle?"

Gusty died in 1985 at the age of 95, when his house burned down. He was trapped upstairs. One of the last of the old generation of south-central Kentucky fiddlers, he was a living example of the importance that the old timers placed on being faithful to one's cultural as well as family traditions:

"My father died when I was seventeen years old, and I never will forget what he said. He called me to the bed, and he said, 'Well, it's left up to you to do the playing now.'