NY Times article on Old Time sessions

It doesn’t really have anything to do with Irish music directly, but the sentiment could be applicable. Maybe. The comments are interesting -- quite a few seem to be from other Old Time players who disagree with the article’s premise that the music is fragile, the tradition withering. According to the commentators,there are lots of Old Time sessions around the US, which I can believe (when I lived there, there were a few occasions where I accidentally found myself at one, which was awkward, and the occasional Old Time player found themselves at an Irish session, which was also awkward). I guess the style and tunes specific to that part of Missouri might be at risk, but not the tradition itself.

The article’s other premise -- that not having sessions sucks -- is one I can totally get on board with.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/us/ozarks-mcclurg-jam.html

They mentioned the old-time musicians playing schottisches: are those like our barndances?

I read that article and the link to missing our live Irish trad sessions certainly resonates, but I think the writer leaned much too heavily on the idea that OldTime music would be lost without OT jams because the musicians can’t read sheet music. That’s nonsense.

This music has been recorded for as long as it’s been recognized as a distinct style of music. There are more “roots” recordings of the origin of OldTime and Mountain music than there are for early Irish trad music which is lost in the pre-recording era of the 1800’s and further back. The OT community can learn by ear from recordings and videos of departed masters as well as we can in ITM when we can’t gather in person. There is nothing unique about OldTime music gatherings in this respect.

“Tradition is a guide, not a jailer…”
This is wisdom in my humble opinion. It is times such as these when I seek out alternatives to keep my “sessioning” going. Tunes wither if I they are left alone. Tradition lives when young meddlers find a way to play. Sometimes an old-timer can learn from someone younger. I do.

A schottische is a schottische -- it’s like a slow polka or a pointy barn dance, and lots of different countries have tunes they call schottisches.

Yes, it did seem as if the journalist was putting a spin on the article to make it grabby and exciting, but I assumed the way people learn and pass on Old Time tunes is fairly similar to Irish/Scottish. So while people are annoyed and fed up with lockdown, the tunes, ultimately, will be fine.

Nice piece. I learned about Old Time one corner of the USA. I have no grumbles about the way it was presented for a readership that mainly doesn’t know about sessions and jams.

(and am wont to grumble about people who make their living from column inches but don’t seem to put the time in to know their subject)

I think the times have brought a concentration of reminders that old folks won’t be with us forever. I wonder if it’s made people less uncomfortable about “better record grandad before he dies”. There are a couple of old guys at local sessions who I am relieved will have had their jabs by now. Not ‘source musicians’ but people who played with source musicians who’s biographies make much of the old guys *they* played with.

There is a discussion of the article on mudcat, which hasn’t got any further than this one but one post points out that as well as keeping people apart the pandemic has also kept generations together at home. And one of the comments on the NYT article suggests setting someone up with a phone so they can teach tunes to a grandchild over Zoom.

My experience here. I play more often in an old time group and have to say that there are/were more opportunities to play in old time sessions than in Irish. Can’t say I really like the music but I do love the people I play with. I can say that the OT sessions (jams) and Irish sessions share a lot in common, the same arguments about tradition, the same dedication to the “right” way to play a tune (my way of course), pretty much the same distain for for formal music, trouble with too many backers … mostly the same complaints, and the same camaraderie, and everybody plays the melody with little room for harmony or improvisation. There are some differences though they aren’t deep. Old time tunes can go on forever played over and over and over again and playing in sets is less common, that’s more of a Contra thing. When they do find themselves in Irish territory tunes are played more simply, no ornamentation/articulation … kinda dumbed down … and though most of the notes are there they just don’t sound very Irish. Please know that when I play old time it’s mostly on my bass so I get to be more of an observer. I really don’t feel like I have to have a strong knowledge of the melody to make a bass work with old time, something I could never get away with were I to play bass with Irish (rarely done). Old time bass lines are usually the 1/4/5/, 1/5, some 2/5/1, and the mystery chord is usually either a 6 or a 3. The less colorful I play the more the melody players like it. OK I digress, sorry.

Maybe it’s more important to say that both Irish and old time are plagued by the same worry that it’s a dying tradition absorbed into other forms like country and bluegrass To be sure there are young players to be found but seemingly fewer of them. I can say that here in my part of the world I am more representative of the average aged player and I first met my mother a long time ago. Maybe this is the way it’s always in what I choose to call informal music circles. We cling to the tunes we think we remember the way our grandparents played them. As young people we thought they cool and for diminishing numbers of us we stay with them all our lives. We have to know that all of us whether we play Irish, Scot, Cajun, Quebecois, Contra, Scandi Gullah, and a host of other cultural traditions will always be on the fringes and accept that. But no matter what the masses are using for music at any given time in history we will always be there.

Thanks for listening to my irrelevant ramble.

When I read the article I found it difficult to swallow the claim that a pandemic-induced hiatus in jam sessions, or even the possibility of COVID wiping out older players are primary dangers to the survival of the local strain of Ozarks OT music. Even pre-pandemic, one of the youngest guys going to the the jam was 74 years old. If no young folks (in their fifties?) go to the jam anyway, the tradition won’t be passed on, a one or two year hiatus notwithstanding. Still, I did enjoy seeing an article about current OT music in the NY Times.

I don’t know anything about the American old-time scene, but it’s worth pointing out that the Irish folk music O’Neill collected and this site is organized around has been on its deathbed for several hundred years. Ethnic or folk music traditions are always described as fragile and dying, because they whole idea of ethnic or folk music only exists in opposition to some other larger body of music. it only becomes “folk music” when it encounters non-folk music.

In O‘Neill’s childhood Irish people listened to lots of different music. Even then, he says, the rural dance music was marginalized and disdained--by the church, and by “west brits” or people eager to seem respectable. He describes “Father Mathew brass bands” driving the piper out of fashion: that would be in the 1850s. It was always marginal or minority music even in the era O’Neill described as its heyday.

In Chicago he found both lots of players AND lots of Irish born immigrants who wanted nothing to do with rural dance music--he mentions that fairly often as well. And he was convinced he had failed and the music would die out, 100 years ago. And yet here we are, just as in 1900, a community interested in a marginal music tradition we imagine as fragile and dying. And just as in 1900, or 1800, the majority of people IN IRELAND don’t listen to this music regularly or exclusively.

Irish music sessions around here skew old, but that’s partly because the Baby boomers were a really huge demographic sector--there are a lot of boomers. I’ve been to sessions where I’m the oldest guy by twenty or more years. And the young people were way way better than me: not just technically: they had deep knowledge of traditional playing styles.

There’s always a thesis/antithesis thing at work: highly commercialized music creates an appetite for its opposite. Commercial country music in the US is still chock full of hosannas to old time fiddlers or grandpappy’s banjo: as always, a minority of listeners will be motivated to look beyond the superficial and dig deeper.

About the fragility of the tradition, the availability of recordings, and the vast numbers of people playing Old Time, it’s a double-edged thing.

You have a pool of tunes that are played by everybody all over and have been recorded endlessly, and you have old local tunes that might only be known by a single obscure elderly player, tunes which have never been recorded or written down. Those tunes will die with that player.

An old friend whose family came from Missouri, and who lived in the Ozarks for a time, plays old time banjo and concentrates on the older Missouri repertoire. He found that the current generation of players don’t play the old local tunes nor do they play in the old local style.

So “old time music” as a blanket US thing, with a widespread generic oft-recorded repertoire, is alive and well.

But many local tunes and styles are disappearing.

““I’m one of the younger ones, and I’m 74,” said Steve Assenmacher, a bass player who lives just up the hill from the McClurg Store and acts as its caretaker.”

Mr. Assenmacher is not the youngest player. The article mentions a 38 year old fiddler from the McClurg jam, David Scrivner.

"The McClurg jam was the classroom where Mr. Scrivner soaked in the stories and techniques of the older musicians, especially Mr. Holt.

He recalled one particularly practical lesson: when and how to tap his foot to keep the beat. “I didn’t have it,” Mr. Scrivner said. “And he stopped in the middle of a tune and let me know that I needed to either tap my foot right or not at all.”

That classroom has ceased to exist, at least for the time being."

https://static.nytimes.com/podcasts/2021/02/02/us/OZARK-MUSIC-SCRIvener/David-Scrivner-Plays-Unique-Ozarks-Fiddle-Tune-From-McClurg-MP3.mp3

I have a friend who plays in the McClurg session and has for many, many years. He’s around 60 (just a tad past) and one helluva fiddler, and he learned a lot of tunes and style from Bob Holt who is referenced in the article) . I live a bit to the West of the Ozarks, but spend a lot of time down there and have played at Celtic Heritage Festivals in the area for years. I also incorporate a few of the tunes from the Ozarks I picked up from my friend into our mainly Irish repertoire, and they often are audience favorites around my area. This was an interesting article to read…thank you for sharing.

I would not take this article as an overall assessment of the state of Old Time music and jams. This was just one small jam in Missouri. I have played in both Irish sessions and old time jams for years. There are some similarities for sure, but they are different. Yes, in old time you might play one tune solidly for 5-10 minutes. Another thing: in most old time jams you stick with a key. I’ve been to festival jams where we played in the key of G for 3 hours straight before changing. The emphasis on rhythm is strong. That doesn’t necessarily characterize all old time jams, but it holds pretty true for a lot of festival jams. Unlike bluegrass jams, in old time people don’t take solos. That’s more of a performance band thing and bluegrass is centered more around performance and technical skill. I love both Irish music and old time. The thing that attracts me to old time more so than Irish sessions is the sense of community. There is that in Irish music too, but it really stands out in old time.

Irish music is definitely more organized than old time. There aren’t abc search engines that I’m aware of that cater to old time. If you know the name of a tune there’s a reasonable chance of finding MP3s, videos, or even notation. That said, there are many many versions of tunes that share a title. If you look up a common OT tune like Lost Indian you can easily find 6-10 different versions. So if calling it out you might have to say Ed Haley’s Lost Indian. Even really oddly named tunes like No Corn on Tygart I’ve found have 3 different tunes sharing the name.