Flog (Fiddle Blog)

Fiddle 4 Old-Time (Tue) – week 3

A couple of tunes with some nice bow-rocking/shuffle pattern opportunities. Both are from John Salyer.

Jack Wilson in D

[under construction]
played slow

medium tempo

The Speed of the Plow in A (cross-tuning)

[under construction]
played slow

Filed under: Fiddle 4, Paul Tyler by Paul | March 17, 2010 | Comments (0)

Fiddle 3 (Mon) – week 3

Here’s “Frosty Morning.” Note that it’s frosty, but not a “Cold Frosty Morn,” which is a Melvin Wine tune. The Fuzzy Mountain String Band’s tune comes from Henry Reed. Click on Henry’s name to take you to a choice of recordings of Henry playing the tune on the wonderful American Folklife Center’s website “Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier.” Go visit again when you’ve got time to poke around. It’s very rich.

Frosty Morning

[under construction]
played slow

medium tempo

BTW: I just determined Fuzzy Mountain’s sources for our previous two tunes. They learned “Green Willis” from Taylor Kimble of Laurel, Virginia. “Magpie” came from Harlan Coble of Guilford County, North Carolina. Ironically, I was living in Guilford County in 1971 and ‘72 when that Fuzzy Mountain LP first came out. Wish I had known. I was just then making my first (unsuccessful) attempt at learning the fiddle.

Filed under: Uncategorized by Paul | March 16, 2010 | Comments (0)

Old Time Ensemble (Wed) – week 2

Charlie Acuff called it the “Old Yellow Dog went trottin’ through the meetin’ house.” But the tune dates back to the mid-1800s and was known variously as “The Old Gray Horse came tearin’ through the wilderness” and as a campaign song, “Old Abe Lincoln came tearin’ outa the wilderness.”

Charlie Acuff plays Old Yellow Dog, with John Harford on the banjo.

[under construction]
played slow

medium tempo

Filed under: Old Time Ensemble, Paul Tyler by Paul | March 16, 2010 | Comments (0)

Fiddle 4 Old-Time (Tue) – week 2

We bravely made our way to the key of C. (Hey, this is Fiddle 4).

Our tune comes from John Salyer, a fabulous fiddler from eastern Kentucky who made a bunch of home recordings in the early 1940s. He traveled around the entire planet after being discharged from the army in the Phillipines. He came to Chicago for the World’s Fair and played for dances in a downtown hotel. He went back to Kentucky where he farmed and taught school. He never made any commercial records.

Indian Ate a Woodchuck

played slow

medium tempo

Filed under: Fiddle 4, Paul Tyler by Paul | March 16, 2010 | Comments (0)

wednesday 630 fiddle 2 week 2 needlecase in D

medium speed

slow

Filed under: Fiddle 2, Steve Rosen by Steve | March 12, 2010 | Comments (0)

Playing and Downloading

Here are some wonderful instructions about how to listen to and manage the tunes you hear. Thanks for the info, Paul!

*****

What happens when you click on a tune link depends on what web browser you use and how you have it set to handle .mp3 files.

Here’s what I’ve learned about Firefox, my browser of choice. I rely on iTunes to manage music files. Unfortunately, iTunes is bundled with Quicktime, which insinuates itself into Firefox as the default plug-in for all sorts of media files. In Firefox, Quicktime will not play more than a few seconds of a tune. So I changed my Firefox settings.

Firefox for Windows instructions: click these in order
Tools (menu bar)
Options (bottom of the menu)
Content (tab or button)
File Types (box) with Manage (button)
Search for or scroll down to find MP3 (”MPEG Layer 3 Audio”)
Change Action (button)
Save to computer (check box)

Firefox for Mac suggestions
To download, one of these should work.
right-click link, or
hold down Apple and click link, or
hold down Alt-Option and click link

You can also pick another music program as a default to open mp3 files.
If you’re smarter than me you can install another plug-in to be the default.

Quicktime works better with Internet Explorer, but I don’t care to use that browser.

If anyone has any advice for other browsers and platforms, please share it with the rest of the Fiddle Blog.

Good Luck.

Paul

Filed under: Instructions by Gregg | March 12, 2010 | Comments (0)

FIDDLE 3 tuesday 8PM, (wrongly named) french canadien tune in G

i will find out what the real title is, but it is NOT the newlyweds reel, though there are similarities.
meduim

slow

Filed under: Fiddle 3, Steve Rosen by Steve | March 11, 2010 | Comments (0)

Early Country Ensemble – weeks 1 & 1

Let’s see if we can do this . . .

Week 1 we did

Down on the Banks of the Ohio by the Blue Sky Boys, 1936

Here’s one to help get ready for Week 2
Take Me Back to the Sweet Sunny South by Dacosta Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters, 1928

[click on the arrow to play or right click on the highlight to download and save]

Filed under: Paul Tyler by Paul | March 9, 2010 | Comments (0)

Fiddle 3 (Mon) – week 2

Staying with the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, a group from Chapel Hill-Durham, North Carolina that was at the forefront of the old-time music revival of the 1970s. Here’s a tune in D . . .

Green Willis

slow

Filed under: Fiddle 3, Paul Tyler by Paul | March 8, 2010 | Comments (0)