music and hearing I
I'm feeling a strong need to tell my tale - how I had a music career, limited as it was, and how I lost my hearing, to the point that a weblog like this is somewhat pointless unless I find something to do with it. So this post is about the music career, and also about the weblog, by the way, which isn't going anywhere because it has all my music and movies on it. No way will I just delete it because I myself can't appreciate it anymore.
I grew up in a musical family - my parents weren't musicians, but my grandparents on my dad's side were, and cousins. on my mom's side too. Music was encouraged and my mother gave me piano lessons and set me going on the cello.
I was no Pablo Casals but did enjoy it, until I went traveling, and had no real source of music until I was given a banjo years later. It was an old mountain banjo - long and without an echo attachment, and I played it for years.
I noticed several things about the banjo. First, it was rich and full in sound, so I was capable of filling a space, good or bad, with its fullness and variety of notes. Second, it competed directly with the voice which made singing to it harder. Third, guitar players didn't quite know how to deal with it - rather than slowing down, which would allow me to fill in the space around them, they would speed up, hoping to keep up with me but instead making too much noise for the listener to process. our informal jams were uncomfortable and not especially pleasant unless i found a relaxed bass-type player who could just play an easy tune and sing to it. Fiddles worked too, same principle. A fiddler could play at any speed and, because it didn't compete directly with the banjo, we could work out together how we wanted to fit in to each other.
Finally though, I was a frailer, and coudn't seem to pick up other methods, like clawhammer and finger-picking. It's almost like having been taught frailing, that was the only way I could relate to it. I got to a certain point - had one or two good songs - and coudn't seem to go any further. Part of it was that I wasn't getting out and hearing and playing a variety of music. At home alone, or perhaps in the coffee shop, only a couple of songs came out of me. I wasn't making progress.
Switching to the fiddle wasn't all that hard. My experience on the cello meant that I wasn't intimidated by having to find the right spot to put my finger, all by myself, without the help of frets. Though I had grown up in bass clef, I could transfer all of the basic relations between notes over to my new range which though it was high, and competed at the voice octaves, was still something within my reach. After a year or two I became an adequate fidder.
This was in Carbondale where I found a folk singer who needed a fiddler. As it turns out there's a general shortage of fiddlers so from the moment I was adequate there was always pretty high demand for that adequacy. I still had things to learn that I couuldn't seem to learn from others, like how to lead. People are looking to you to go 1, 2, 3 (play) and where was I? I hadn't even thought of it. I should, when starting, make sure everyone knows which key, which song, when we're starting, etc. - how do you learn this? When you're the only fiddler you don't. One friend of mine stepped on my toe, aggrieved because I had a hard time hearing "turns" and when it was mine, and when it was not. I made some unnecessary noise it seems.
I played with the folk singer and our band created one CD, Life Goes On (Parsley Sagebrush Band) which I still keep right in front me here at my seat, in spite of being unable to enjoy it. Ironically she needed one more song and included my banjo song in there, along with a really good bass player friend of ours, so that's the only song of mine ever actually produced. It's a train song Long Way to Centralia if you ever look it up; I plan to make a train movie with it but unfortunately my difficult hearing situation is getting in the way.
The folksinger was aggrieved that I picked up and moved to Texas in 2012 but it was actually good for my fiddling. I found a bunch of good-old bluegrass pickers who wanted nothing more than to play Dixie songs fast once a week, and that's what we did for a few years. Their banjo picker was the best I'd ever heard, still is, but didn't want to. perform (been there, done that) and we'd just play killer bluegrass at every opportunity. At first I thought they wanted to run me out of there, with those fast Dixie songs (they knew I was a Yankee the minute I opened my mouth) but they didn't, it's just that that's what they really wanted to do, as much as possible, and pretty soon I was fast enough, and knew the Dixie songs (at least my own version of them, which I sometimes had to make up) - I was having blast. I was at the peak of my skill.
One night we were playing in an insurance office. At this point I'd play with them on Tuesday nights until about ten, and then drive the six hours out to New Mexico until the middle of midnight, with the bluegrass still rolling in my ears. I was sawing away but we were just playing the usual stuff, Dixie songs and bluegrass, real fast. Some old guy came up to me and said, in front of everyone, to me more or less, that he was well over ninety, had been listening to this stuff all his life, and had never heard better.
That was the peak of my career. I had other peaks, playing Bob Wills' fiddle, playing on certain stages after Charlie Daniels, playing with this person or that, but nothing topped what that old guy said. He was sincere. He knew what he was talking about. He said it more or less to me. We were hot that night.
But alas, it was true: I'd moved to New Mexico. I was not long for their band, and we all knew it. The banjo picker had actually lived out there, on the border of Texas and New Mexico, in the plains, on a farm, but nothing. lasts forever, and that particular combination, what we had, went by the wayside. In New Mexico I lost my hearing, see part II. All that fine music is now just a memory.
In some ways I just want to write a book about it (especially the Texas years) but in others I can hardly bear to think about it. I want to write a biography of Bela Fleck. Keep my mind sharp and still be part of the music world. But it's slipping away, partly because it's just too hard to think about it.
I grew up in a musical family - my parents weren't musicians, but my grandparents on my dad's side were, and cousins. on my mom's side too. Music was encouraged and my mother gave me piano lessons and set me going on the cello.
I was no Pablo Casals but did enjoy it, until I went traveling, and had no real source of music until I was given a banjo years later. It was an old mountain banjo - long and without an echo attachment, and I played it for years.
I noticed several things about the banjo. First, it was rich and full in sound, so I was capable of filling a space, good or bad, with its fullness and variety of notes. Second, it competed directly with the voice which made singing to it harder. Third, guitar players didn't quite know how to deal with it - rather than slowing down, which would allow me to fill in the space around them, they would speed up, hoping to keep up with me but instead making too much noise for the listener to process. our informal jams were uncomfortable and not especially pleasant unless i found a relaxed bass-type player who could just play an easy tune and sing to it. Fiddles worked too, same principle. A fiddler could play at any speed and, because it didn't compete directly with the banjo, we could work out together how we wanted to fit in to each other.
Finally though, I was a frailer, and coudn't seem to pick up other methods, like clawhammer and finger-picking. It's almost like having been taught frailing, that was the only way I could relate to it. I got to a certain point - had one or two good songs - and coudn't seem to go any further. Part of it was that I wasn't getting out and hearing and playing a variety of music. At home alone, or perhaps in the coffee shop, only a couple of songs came out of me. I wasn't making progress.
Switching to the fiddle wasn't all that hard. My experience on the cello meant that I wasn't intimidated by having to find the right spot to put my finger, all by myself, without the help of frets. Though I had grown up in bass clef, I could transfer all of the basic relations between notes over to my new range which though it was high, and competed at the voice octaves, was still something within my reach. After a year or two I became an adequate fidder.
This was in Carbondale where I found a folk singer who needed a fiddler. As it turns out there's a general shortage of fiddlers so from the moment I was adequate there was always pretty high demand for that adequacy. I still had things to learn that I couuldn't seem to learn from others, like how to lead. People are looking to you to go 1, 2, 3 (play) and where was I? I hadn't even thought of it. I should, when starting, make sure everyone knows which key, which song, when we're starting, etc. - how do you learn this? When you're the only fiddler you don't. One friend of mine stepped on my toe, aggrieved because I had a hard time hearing "turns" and when it was mine, and when it was not. I made some unnecessary noise it seems.
I played with the folk singer and our band created one CD, Life Goes On (Parsley Sagebrush Band) which I still keep right in front me here at my seat, in spite of being unable to enjoy it. Ironically she needed one more song and included my banjo song in there, along with a really good bass player friend of ours, so that's the only song of mine ever actually produced. It's a train song Long Way to Centralia if you ever look it up; I plan to make a train movie with it but unfortunately my difficult hearing situation is getting in the way.
The folksinger was aggrieved that I picked up and moved to Texas in 2012 but it was actually good for my fiddling. I found a bunch of good-old bluegrass pickers who wanted nothing more than to play Dixie songs fast once a week, and that's what we did for a few years. Their banjo picker was the best I'd ever heard, still is, but didn't want to. perform (been there, done that) and we'd just play killer bluegrass at every opportunity. At first I thought they wanted to run me out of there, with those fast Dixie songs (they knew I was a Yankee the minute I opened my mouth) but they didn't, it's just that that's what they really wanted to do, as much as possible, and pretty soon I was fast enough, and knew the Dixie songs (at least my own version of them, which I sometimes had to make up) - I was having blast. I was at the peak of my skill.
One night we were playing in an insurance office. At this point I'd play with them on Tuesday nights until about ten, and then drive the six hours out to New Mexico until the middle of midnight, with the bluegrass still rolling in my ears. I was sawing away but we were just playing the usual stuff, Dixie songs and bluegrass, real fast. Some old guy came up to me and said, in front of everyone, to me more or less, that he was well over ninety, had been listening to this stuff all his life, and had never heard better.
That was the peak of my career. I had other peaks, playing Bob Wills' fiddle, playing on certain stages after Charlie Daniels, playing with this person or that, but nothing topped what that old guy said. He was sincere. He knew what he was talking about. He said it more or less to me. We were hot that night.
But alas, it was true: I'd moved to New Mexico. I was not long for their band, and we all knew it. The banjo picker had actually lived out there, on the border of Texas and New Mexico, in the plains, on a farm, but nothing. lasts forever, and that particular combination, what we had, went by the wayside. In New Mexico I lost my hearing, see part II. All that fine music is now just a memory.
In some ways I just want to write a book about it (especially the Texas years) but in others I can hardly bear to think about it. I want to write a biography of Bela Fleck. Keep my mind sharp and still be part of the music world. But it's slipping away, partly because it's just too hard to think about it.
posted by tom at 2:57 PM
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