To start, let me take you all the way back to when I was a little kid in the ‘60s, at family gatherings in my grandparents’ Kentucky home.
My Uncle Homer was a self-taught country musician who would often play guitar and sing at those gatherings. Sometimes he’d pull out a French harp, and I can still play the train sounds that he taught me when I was maybe six. He wasn’t a fiddler or banjo player, but the way he made music--unpretentious, joyful, completely his own--lodged itself somewhere deep in me. Without realizing it at the time I was learning about what music is for, and it made me want to learn to play music myself.
Fast forward to around 1980, in Bloomington, Indiana, when I found my way to fiddling. I had been playing guitar and banjo for some years when my folklorist friend Chris Wilson introduced me to her record collection. There were some legendary LPs in it, but one in particular really grabbed me: Tommy Jarrell's Sail Away Ladies, an album of solo old-time fiddling that hit me with a sound I can only describe as archaic, emotional, and rhythmically powerful in a way I had never heard before. It made my hair stand on end, and it still does. Now it was fiddle or bust.
Not long after, a bandmate handed me an old violin that was literally in pieces, and said that it was mine provided that I could get it reassembled and set up. I somehow scraped together a hundred dollars (I was a stereotypically poor musician back then) and took it to a luthier. Once it was fixed I took it home and worked out Old Joe Clark in the best scratchy way I could. My self-education in fiddling involved a lot of careful, if sometimes perplexed, listening to old recordings, picking up what I could from watching and listening to fiddlers I admired like Kenny Baker, Art Stamper, and Joe Stuart at the nearby Bean Blossom bluegrass festival, and corralling local old-time fiddlers like Hawk Hubbard to show me a tune or two.
One time, Chris and I went to visit with Birch Monroe, Bill Monroe's older brother. The highlight of the evening for me was when Birch played Jenny Lynn--the tune that brother Bill had called “the greatest of all”--and hearing the old Kentuckian play that tune, on Uncle Pen’s fiddle no less, carried something you couldn't get just from listening to a recording.
My family roots being in the Appalachians of southeastern Kentucky, old-time mountain music never felt like it was something from a foreign culture. But the more I learned of the music, the more I saw how much more there was to learn. What likewise grew was my understanding of how precious and finite the living connections to the older traditions were becoming.
In early 1985 I had the opportunity to begin touring as guitarist and singer with old-time musicians Brad Leftwich and Linda Higginbotham. Brad was--is--one of the finest traditional fiddlers of his generation. He became something of a mentor who illuminated the nuances of bowing for me, and otherwise opened doors I couldn't have opened on my own. During our travels I got to visit with a number of elder fiddlers who had grown up with the traditional music of their locales, like Virginian Rafe Brady, Melvin Wine of West Virginia, Missourian Lee Stoneking, Violet Hensley of Arkansas, and others. And for years after my two-year stint with Brad and Linda, I continued to take what opportunities I could find--not always easy to come by as I was married and working a “real job” by then--to travel and learn from old folks who had grown up with the music.
As much as I have learned from studying field recordings and old records, and it amounts to a lot, those living encounters shaped my playing in ways that are hard to put into words. You absorb not just the tunes but a way of feeling the bow, of sitting inside the rhythm, of finding the space and letting a tune breathe. And something even more intangible and hard to describe.
Eventually I felt that my playing, informed by all those encounters with living and dead fiddlers, had genuinely become something my own.
Which brings me to why I'm writing.
Not too long ago, I started thinking about the hundreds of old-time pieces I've learned over a lifetime of fiddling. Many of those tunes I hadn't played in years. I wanted to remember them, relearn them, and play some of them better. And it came to me that a great way to do that would be make a project out of recording as many of them as I can, even if it takes me ten years. Maybe not as polished studio recordings, but as honest documentation of this old-time fiddler's repertoire.
That project idea became the seed of a Patreon page that I call Front Porch Fiddle, which I envision as part personal archive, part teaching resource, and part love letter to a music that has given me more than I can otherwise express. I want to pass along not just the tunes but how those old-timers put the fiddle in their fiddling. And there’s the essential, intangible aspects, and the connection to all the old fiddlers that have inspired and taught me--I want to somehow get all that across, as best as I can.
Because that inheritance matters to me.
I know this is a long missive, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that you’re interested enough to read this far. If you’re in love with this rugged and beautiful old music, just beginning to explore it, or looking to deepen your repertoire and style, if you want to connect with that intangible something else, come visit with me on the Porch. Let me show you some tunes I know.
By the way, today is Front Porch Fiddle launch day! I'll post the details here later this morning.
Warmly,
Kenny
