The Old 78s at Winfield 2007

The Old 78’s

Walnut Valley Festival 2007

An old wooden slat bench and a late Saturday night Winfield date created the perfect setting for enjoying this highly accomplished Old-Time group. The husband-wife duo of Old-Time fiddler Curly Miller and innovative Traditional banjoist Carole Anne Rose were joined by Classic banjoist extraordinaire Clarke Buehling. In this extended interview with the trio, we catch a passing glimpse of the years of historical research, quiet practice and professional playing experience that led to their ability to faithfully recreate American music of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. You will derive more from the interview by first reading already available information on the group’s website, theold78s.com, and playprettyproductions.com/skirtlifters for further information on Clarke Buehling. Also recommended is a charming and informative article written by Eddie Collins and published in the Fall 1996 5-String Quarterly at itap2.com/band.htm. Enjoy!

The Music

FAF: What draws you to this musical niche? What was the background and cultural heritage that led you to specialize in the Old-Time genre? Where did you begin?

CLARKE: I liked folk music back in the ‘60s. I wasn’t playing then. Hobart Smith, a banjo player, came to our high school for a performance, and I knew I wanted to play the banjo. He played about anything I guess. I was taken by his performance and by the sound of the instrument; about 1965 that was.

CURLY: I had a friend who turned me on to playing Leo Kottke-type fingerstyle. But actually, the thing that got me playing more of the American traditional music was coming to Winfield, back in ’77, and seeing Norman Blake and Doc Watson, ‘cause I was playing a lot of guitar then. And then Bob Atchison, who you just met, was playing with Cathy Barton and Dave Para. He and James Bryan were the first two people I ever heard actually play Old-Time music. Then in ’82 DeDannon was here at Winfield and that got me immersed in playing pretty hard core Irish music for about five years.

And then I heard Clarke Buehling at the Osage Valley [Ark.] Pumpkin Festival. Clarke, Hawk Hubbard and Billy Matthews, with Marie Wade were playing as The Skirtlifters, and they needed a bass player and I had an old bass. So I started playing with them and then all of a sudden we were playing these really high profile gigs where we started to really get exposed to the Old-Time.

FAF: And so, at the time Curly started playing with you Clarke, you were already playing in this genre, or were you evolving?

CLARKE: Oh yes, always evolving! When I started playing the banjo, I soon after picked up the fiddle and I was working on harmonica and guitar and other related instruments. And I was pretty much isolated except for periodically being in Illinois. I had a buddy who played guitar, and we’d hitchhike around and go out to the Newport Folk Festival and other places. We had worked up a little act on the banjo and guitar, and I’d play some fiddle tunes and sing. So that got me going; kind of how the music worked, playing on the cuff, landing on my feet, and how to cover. And I played some Bluegrass; it was all part of the same bag.

But when I went out to school on the West Coast, the Bay Area, I ran into some people who encouraged me to play Old-Time music rather than Bluegrass, which I did stick with for a while. And then I found that there was another style of banjo, Classic Style. I was in England and ran into some Classic Style players and brought some sheet music home, in 1972, and found that there was a teacher to teach that. So I went to Connecticut to learn to play from an old master, Frank Bradbury. He was a master of the Classic Style of fingerstyle banjo. You can relate it to classical guitar: the style of playing the nylon strings, and thumb and two fingers, like Bluegrass, but techniques that are different than Bluegrass.

So I did that, and started collecting sheet music. A box of mando sheet music was bestowed upon me and I started rummaging through it. It had belonged to an old banjo player named Thomas Bree. It was in his family and they got rid of it, didn’t know what to do with it. He was a well-known minstrel player and banjo maker on the West Coast. So I had some of his handwritten arrangements and things he collected, torn pages out of books, that sort of stuff. And that led to other things. It led to the American Banjo Fraternity, which also led me to Minstrel music because they were people interested in the history of the banjo. They helped me find Minstrel music which, I had to go to the libraries and find old books. Now some of it’s been republished, most of it has.

CAROLE ANNE: I was always interested in Old-Time music but I didn’t really know what it was when I lived on the East Coast because if you go to a festival that features banjos it’s almost always Bluegrass. But every once in a while you’d hear something that was different, and run up to the stage, and then of course they would switch back to Bluegrass. So there was this music that existed that I wasn’t really able to identify but I knew that I really liked it. I think it’s just amazing that I moved from New Jersey to Arkansas and met Curly, who was just at that point joining The Skirtlifters and they were playing the exact music that I was looking for but completely not able to identify. It was really like I had moved to heaven and I got to follow The Skirtlifters around and listen to the music they were playing, and Curly was practicing the bass.

I had already played guitar and Curly was playing Irish with Pete Howard, so I could immediately play with Curly and Pete, Irish music on guitar. But over a very short period of time I realized it was possible for me to switch to banjo and I had always loved the banjo, my Dad loved banjo; I listened to banjo music my whole childhood because of his LPs. So, it was pretty exciting for me. Another band member of The Skirtlifters, Billy Matthews, was making banjos. So Curly bought one of his banjos for me for my birthday. We call it The Rose Banjo because Billy put a rose on it. It is a steel string banjo and normal-sized. Being a small person, it’s just a little bit bigger than what I can comfortably play, and we were lucky to find a smaller banjo.

As we got busier on the farm, Curly and I started to play together more and more, and actually could not leave, so we kind of focused on music that we were playing together. We only had the time to do it at home; we just could not travel.

CURLY: We started playing Classic Banjo duets together...When we got used to being in The Skirtlifters, it was right away the fascination to think of doing the Classic fingerstyle stuff and we loved the discipline and the practice of it and the way they come together as a duo. So we started playing fingerstyle on our own, Carole and I did, and tried to work up a small repertoire of that, which, that stuff takes forever to learn. It takes 40, 50, 60 hours of practice to get something to a peak performance.

FAF: Why does it take so long?

CURLY: Because they are incredibly difficult. They take a lot of practice.

CLARKE: And then you forget them. If you don’t play them you forget them, so then you need to remind yourself how it goes; you need to keep up your chops.

FAF: What are the general chronological boundaries for songs you perform? Are there certain years on either end, or eras?

CURLY: Start with Clarke: he’s older (all laugh). His stuff is older!

CLARKE: Pretty much as I started understanding it, and taking the material I wanted to work out of the sheet music collection that I had. Primarily that was 1880s to about 1915, and then I found that I could expand backward through the Civil War with the earlier material. Then I’ve been recently trying to get earlier in some of the plantation tunes and of course that’s more difficult to dig that stuff up, but there are a few pieces around. And now my interest has expanded into African music. So, I’m kind of going in the wrong direction with this (all laugh)!

CURLY: Clarke was definitely the inspiration for us playing Classic Banjo. Even though I was already a fairly accomplished musician, I had never heard of it, and most people don’t even know what it is. We try to explain it when we’re on stage. That era of Classic Banjo really was dying out when they were first starting to make cylinders; what, around 1915?

CLARKE: It was pretty well in the middle of where they were doing cylinders, but when they were doing electric 78s, then it was dying. It died about after the First World War. It spans between the Civil War and the First World War.

CURLY: There’s not a big historical record on any kind of recording because recording was still in its primitive phase. But the other thing that Carole and I have done is a lot of dance music.

There’s a Golden Age of Old-Time music recording, from about 1925 to ’34 or ’35. In the ‘20s, 80 percent of the population lived on farms and were rural. From then until the Stock Market Crash and The Great Depression, people that lived in the country actually were doing pretty well. They were mostly self-sufficient, could grow a crop or raise some hogs and take it to town and get a fair market value for their labor and have some disposable income; not a lot, because they were rural people. But they had some disposable income.

At the same time, record players were getting mainstream and cheap. In 1925, some record people got the idea that there was a market there, and they started recording Eck Robertson and Fiddlin’ John Carson, and some of the earlier recorded fiddle players, and then the industry sprung up. So, unlike Classic Banjo, there is a very large body of work in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s of fiddle tunes, and it’s fiddle-based band stuff. It’s what those people wanted to hear. Bluegrass didn’t even exist.

FAF: Could you define fiddle band?

CURLY: An ordinary fiddle band would be, like, a fiddle player, probably a banjo player, and a guitar player, and maybe a bass or even a bowed cello. Sometimes two fiddles. Some of the super bands, like Gid Tanner & The Skillet Lickers, had as many as four fiddle players and they were almost like a vaudeville act. They had jokes, they had funny songs. One guy would sing in a falsetto and he sounded like an old woman, and they were a show, almost like a vaudeville act.

So that body of work is very broad, and there’s a lot of different regional styles. Everybody wanted to hear their local heroes; then they could buy that record. So, like in West Virginia, everybody wanted to hear Clark Kessinger. He was the very fancy fiddler, and actually, his grand nephew Robin Kessinger is here [at Winfield ‘07]. He’s a guitar player. Doris was married to Clark’s brother, and we met her. And he was a tremendous fiddle player. They were great musicians because they played all the time. They didn’t have TV or radio; that was their entertainment.

So people wanted to buy what they were familiar with, which was mostly square dance music, and the songs usually were still based in square dance music. They would have a theme and then they’d sing, and they were based on moonshine a lot too.

CLARKE: And a carry-over from the Minstrel show. A lot of them used Minstrel show material.

FAF: Go ahead and define Minstrel show.

CLARKE: Minstrel show is a form of entertainment that started in the 1840s with individuals who worked in Blackface as Ethiopian Delineators. They put on a mask of paint and did parodies, tunes, songs and dances in Blackface to appear as a plantation African American, Southern African American usually. There are different standard characters in the 1840s and ‘50s, stock characters developed, and it became bigger and bigger until it became America’s major form of entertainment. Vaudeville, Hee-Haw, all these things came out of that. Most of our stage comedy entertainment came out of what developed in that theater, that style.

FAF: And the musical instruments for it?

CLARKE: Primarily banjo and fiddle; flute, accordion. Lots of banjo and violin music was written down, books of tunes that were used. Stephen Foster wrote for the Minstrel theater. The shows went on riverboats and barges that were pushed around in all the inland areas of the country. They also went around the world. There were troupes in South Africa and troupes went to China and played and Europe and all over. So it was big for almost 100 years. It died out and kind of came back a couple times, but the basic theater of it is still with us.

A special thing it was: that you could do things behind a mask that you wouldn’t do normally, like parodies, satire and things. It frees you up to be someone that you would not maybe want yourself known to be! And I’m skirting around the idea of racism. We see it, we look back at it and say, ‘This is very racist.’ And it doesn’t take in the whole concept very well. It simplifies it down to what it wasn’t necessarily all the time, at that time. But anyway, it affected the recordings of the ‘20s. It affected the country music, the types of tunes were still being played that went way back. Old Dan Tucker was one of the very first tunes and it is still played; also, the idea of the comic skits of the Skillet Lickers in the 1920s.

CURLY: We saw it all on TV with The 3 Stooges and Spanky & Our Gang. We saw the descendancy of that form of entertainment. In the ‘50s and ‘60s when we were all kids we saw it on TV every Saturday morning.

And to finish the fiddle aspect, there were all different regional styles. Old-Time music is really still obscure, even compared to Bluegrass; it’s maybe only 10 percent of what Bluegrass is. If you go back East, there’s a huge festival we go to, Cliff Top in West Virginia, and the people there are really into Appalachian style. We’ve done a lot of that. They’re into real regional, everybody’s real specific.

What happened over the years is that we were really isolated. For about a decade we didn’t even keep playing Classic Banjo. We just didn’t have enough energy or time because we were working so hard on the farm. But we got big collections of 78s. They’ve all been reissued on CDs and remastered. So it was basically us isolated and playing contra dance music. In about ’96 or so, we started getting into raggy tunes in flatted keys, and most of them, strangely enough, were from Mississippi, East Texas and Arkansas, and the South Central region.

Then we were asked to teach at Swannanoa. We realized that people just weren’t playing this a whole lot, because there were strange keys like F and B flat and E flat, which are actually more classical violin keys. But I was trained, played in orchestras when I was younger. So we’ve really been pursuing that genre, and what it was is Raggy. It just got raggier and raggier. There were people playing Rags all over, but they really were into it in the South Central part of the country. We feel it’s probably due to the New Orleans/Mississippi River influence.

CLARKE: There was a large community of musicians in Southwest Missouri and Western Missouri and all the various parts where the mining towns were: the Galena lead mines, the black communities. So Southwest Missouri was a hotbed of Ragtime. Numerous composers came from there, and people who never were recognized or never published, black and white.

CURLY: Scott Joplin was from Sedalia. And then there was becoming a huge body of work in the Ragtime.

CLARKE: Scott Joplin lived in Sedalia, Missouri, which is central, towards Kansas City a bit, and that was a big [area for Ragtime]. He was part of a brass band, played piano in the local mens’ club, and did various things. He got published, that was the important thing.

CURLY: My personal belief is that the ‘20s was a phenomenally fertile time musically because, for the first time, people could listen to whatever they wanted. If you lived in the country in the teens, and around the Turn of the Century, the only thing you heard was what was in that county. But during the ‘20s, everybody started having record players and radios. Stations were blasting all over the country. They had enormous radio stations. You could hear the Manitoba station all the way down here in Springfield, Missouri, so you could hear Canadian fiddling. Well, what happened is the whole pot got stirred, and Ragtime and Charleston and early Jazz were really popular. And I think a lot of the country hillbilly fiddle players started hearing that, and some of them wanted to cash in on the Raggy things. And then I think a lot of other people just were experimenting. Particularly in this part of the country, they started playing a lot of Rags. In fact, I think the East Texas Serenaders had a lot to do with modern Texas Swing. And all this stuff kind of just swelled up out of there.

FAF: What do you mean, regarding the East Texas Serenaders?

CURLY: They were a group from the woods in the eastern part of Texas, and they’re kind of our favorite band, and one of Clarke’s. We play a lot of different stuff, but that’s the genre that Carole and I are specializing in: playing Rags from the South Central part of the United States, on fiddle and banjo.

CLARKE: Fiddle, with the banjo being an accompaniment. This is separate from the banjo Ragtime, the Classic Style, which was going on a little earlier. But we sort of match them together. There are a couple of periods of time that maybe have never really been in the same program together that we’re putting together.

CURLY: They’re definitely heavily related. Clarke’s thing is the late 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, and then, we’ve been playing the Classic Banjo stuff. But then our specialty as a duo is the Flatted Key Rags of the South Central United States.

FAF: Within that period of time that you play, what musical styles do you include or specifically exclude? We have established that Rags and Ragtime are two different things.

CLARKE: We do not do Bluegrass.

FAF: Was there a point in time that you threw away your resonator?

CLARKE: No, it was stolen [lots of laughter], never to be returned. I was walking down a street in Chicago...

CURLY: We’ve been dabbling in Charleston music too. Carole and I started about six-eight months ago playing kazoo with two banjos. About a year ago I asked her to just grab something Charleston because I had all these memories from my childhood around this Golden Era of the Charleston CD and it was just fantastic music. But it’s all brass band oriented and not really fiddle music, although there is a little bit of fiddle happening there. I’ve always been able to play a kazoo, so we just got a kazoo and harmonica Rag so I could play banjo and play the kazoo at the same time. We’re having a ball with it and people really like it, so we’re going to play a kazoo tune this afternoon. But we’ll probably start singing some of them, and the ‘20s stuff also. That stuff all existed in that big melting pot of convergence, of people being able to actually hear different styles of music.

FAF: You’ve already partially answered this question, but do you have favorite eras and favorite songwriters/tunesmiths within those eras?

CURLY: We have some bands we really like. The Griddle Giggers from Southeast Missouri, Northwest Arkansas, we like them a lot. The East Texas Serenaders. And then in Classic Banjo, we really like Park Hunter. He was a composer from Indiana.

CLARKE: I have some favorites, but I only have a couple of tunes of each one. Gad Robinson, Horace Weston, Percy Jaques. Some of the composers of the pieces I play are composers for the piano or some other instrument and I do transcriptions, like of Scott Joplin.

FAF: What types of musical groups would perform these songs, and how would the accompaniment be arranged? We’ve covered some of that already.

CLARKE: Small, amateur ensembles. For Classic Banjo, professionals on the Vaudeville stage, Minstrel shows. College glee clubs often traveled with a banjo orchestra or a mandolin-guitar orchestra, and some of the music was composed for that. Some of the music we do are transcriptions from marching bands. So there is a wide range.

CURLY: In the fiddle genre it was the same thing. A lot of the stuff people were listening to, the people refused the record companies because they really were a rip-off. John Salyer said he could make more money growing corn. And the recordings of him, the great fiddler from Kentucky, were home recordings that somebody made in the ‘40s. But you had the whole array: you had Gid Tanner & The Skillet Lickers, who were very commercial; The Leake County Revellers, who were also very commercial and made a lot of recordings; Narmour & Smith; The Stripling Brothers; they made a lot of recordings.

But then you have another whole body of work. They started doing historic field recordings of some of the old guys in the ‘30s and ‘40s, so you have the whole range. Some of them are homemade too. Dwight Lamb from up here in Iowa recorded Bob Walters and Cyril Stinnett. Bob Walters makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. We know him personally. He did a lot of those recordings, him and R.P. Christensen. And they published books of transcriptions of the tunes. And he’s still around. He has videos, he’s got a complete historical record of a lot of the fiddlers from up in that part of Western, Northern, Northwestern Missouri and Nebraska and Iowa. They’ve got three volumes of fiddle tunes of him and R.P. Christensen collaborated on and put together.

FAF: Are the tunes that you play mostly traditional arrangements or are some of them yours?

CAROLE ANNE: Oh, I think they’re almost all ours.

CLARKE: They’re ours now, if we play them, they’re our arrangements.

CAROLE ANNE: They’re based on the original sheet music, if available.

CLARKE: Well, yeah. Well, we do the solo, but the accompaniment is not written down.

CURLY: Yankee Land is very close. What happens is, the stuff that’s altered is mostly Carole’s part, the second banjo part and some of them are altered just because I like the style that we play better. But then there’s others like Yankee Land that are very close, just slight things to make it easier for Carole. So they’re very close, very true to the tune. They may not be exactly what was written down, but they’re very true in nature.

CLARKE: A little bit of ad libbing but not a whole lot.

CAROLE ANNE: We don’t modernize anything.

CLARKE: We don’t try to make it jazzy, or put a Latin face to it; we don’t try to mix cultures.

FAF: Tell me about particular songbooks or music publishers that stand out from the eras you like to play from and that have been helpful to you.

CLARKE: S.S. Stewart in Philadelphia published between 1880s and about 1900, was a large publisher. Just in general terms, there were several publishers. Oliver Ditson of Boston, and The Banjo Instructors were published by Ditson. Paul Ino published out of Philadelphia, Golby & Shepard out of New Jersey. The other interesting thing is, here in the Midwest, almost all these large towns like Wichita and Omaha all had music publishing houses, and I have sheet music for banjo and mandolin published in places like Topeka and Denver and all the way out to San Francisco. But mostly the Midwest and the East.

FAF: So how did that work? You were sort of ‘making it’ if you got published by your local publisher, but if you really were making it you got published in the East?

CURLY: What I think people don’t realize is that you could go to your Woolworths or 5&10 and they’d have racks of music that people would buy, just like purchasing a book. And you could buy complete arrangements and you could have your own little banjo orchestra or mandolin orchestra.

CLARKE: And another point is that there were teachers in all these large towns. They were little old maids or whatever, music teachers who taught banjo, mandolin and guitar for music, with proper tremolo and this and that. Some were better than others as far as technique, but you could go into town and take banjo lessons. So I suspect that there’s a bit of crossover from the country hand-me-down style oral tradition and that which, from the 1890s on, was learned in town.

CURLY: There were fiddle books like Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, which is now George C. Cole’s book, Cole’s 1,000 Fiddle Tunes. There was a lot that was just published. There’s whole volumes that will have six or seven tunes on each page, books that are an inch thick. And there are a lot of manuals of violin music.

CLARKE: For all instruments, too: for accordion, flute, sometimes all in the same book. Flute in the same book as for the guitar player? Tune books [all laugh]!!

CAROLE ANNE: The other thing about the music that the three of us do is that our music comes from a lot of that old sheet music. Clarke has a phenomenal collection. I know the fiddle tunes that we play probably have not been played in modern times.

CURLY: We play a bunch of what we call ‘Lost Genre Tunes.’ There were a lot of tunes that are actually Celtic-sounding that were probably composed in the early 1800s. One little booklet is from 1829, M. Higgins in St. Louis that composed Arbana Reel, Rhode Island Reel. There were people writing tunes and it is very Scottish ethnic sounding but they were composed over here. We’ll sit around every now and then and Clarke will pull a tune out that I’ve never heard him play and we know that it’s kind of from that genre. We’ve talked about doing a project. We agree nobody plays that.

CAROLE ANNE: We’ve taught classes on what Curly calls ‘The Lost Genre.’ When we taught at Swannanoa, it was with this particular body of tunes. We have this body of tunes for fiddle, and Clarke’s got a similar body of tunes for banjo. We’ve got two projects in mind to do together. The first one is going to be of our current Classic Banjo and Fiddle repertoire that we’re performing. The project after that is The Lost Genre, because these tunes have not been played in modern times and if you don’t read music, and you don’t have an extensive music collection, no one is going to know about these tunes. So we’re hoping to document these lost tunes in modern form so that other fiddlers and banjo players have them for their repertoire.

CURLY: Clarke also plays a bunch of Irish tunes that were written down to be taught for the banjo, which is an oddity. I didn’t realize there was as many written down as there are.

CAROLE ANNE: It would be fascinating to maybe 10 or 12 people in the country [all laugh]!

FAF: I have a four-part question which, again, much may have been answered, but I’ll read it anyway and hope to get fuller answers: 1) How were these songs connected with the people, or a reflection of the people and the times? 2) Were they written specifically for events or people? 3) Do you feel the songs being written today are also useful in the same respects? 4) Do you write and perform your own songs or tunes?

CLARKE: It brings to mind that there were pieces composed to honor or commemorate things like sports. There were titles like The Pony Race or The Photograph Polka, The Steeplechase Gallop and The Donkey Laugh. Like cartoon music. The title suggests something that you think about when you’re listening to the tune that helps put you in a place where you can imagine a race going on or imagine a barnyard or what a country dance would sound like. And you could actually play them at a country dance or as a demonstration of what someone might play at a country dance.

FAF: And this was composed specifically for what he or she knew the people were experiencing every day.

CLARKE: I think so. Like The World’s Fair. There were a lot of dedications, pieces written and then dedicated. The Wild West Gallop dedicated to Buffalo Bill Cody. Others were dedicated to their students, maybe a favorite.

CURLY: They were caricatures of life. The Egyptian Princess, that we started last night’s set with, was written as a caricature piece. At the turn of the century, Africa had only been read of or heard about. These types of tunes are supposed to conjure up visual images in your mind.

FAF: So Egyptian Princess is like a fantasy piece?

CURLY: It’s an incredibly well down piece. Didn’t they call them ‘Orientals?’

CLARKE: Well, there was a period of that in painting and everything else and it spilled over into music. Also, this applies to the Southern blacks who were sort of in peoples’ imaginations in the North, who had no contact with them, and who had some fantasy about what it was like, and romanticized. So you had pieces like what it would be like down on the levee or the riverside, on the plantation, etc. You have Georgia Camp Meeting, where everyone would sneak off and have a party, and Darkie Pastime.

CAROLE ANNE: Then on the other extreme is the fact that people just had a natural joy to play music after working. People were living a hard life, and you’ve got to find joy when you can. The dances that they had, and when they played in their homes, they were playing hard. And even though they worked hard all day, this was joyful energy coming out of sore muscles. People were dancing, they were rolling back the furniture. And they were playing hard and long. And the stories that you hear from the old-timers is that they would dance all night.

CURLY: And then they would go to work in the morning. They were at a different level of physicality than we are because it was more of a Third World country. They were tough.

CAROLE ANNE: So what I feel about our music, and fiddle music in particular, is that the joy that comes out of exerting yourself to extremes comes out in this music.

CURLY: That’s why we want to play dances.

CAROLE ANNE: Yeah, we want to play hard, we want to play long.

FAF: And you feel the music was written for that.

CURLY: Definitely. It was their experience.

FAF: Written for the joy of the people.

CAROLE ANNE: Yes. It came out of them. It was inside them when they worked hard all day, and it came out of them when they played their music all night. The dances were long and hard and you will hear musicians today say they don’t want to play dances because it is grueling, it is hard. You’re playing for two or three hours, playing each one 12-15 minutes. And you want to communicate energy.

FAF: Do you feel that exists today, in the songwriting and music making?

CAROLE ANNE: People are writing Old-Time songs today. The thing is, the character of how we live has changed, so the types of tunes that are being written and played have too. That’s why we can tell the difference between old tunes and new tunes, because the life experience of the person not only writing them but also playing them comes from a different place. It’s still coming from inside, but that person has been shaped from different life experiences. And one of the reasons why we are attracted to that older music, being farmers ourselves, and we work so hard. I guess we feel like we identify with that situation. And there are plenty of people in the world who still work very hard and identify with that situation. But there is a difference. There have been two or three tunes that we locked onto and thought, oh, they are great tunes.

CURLY: We got fooled twice. One was an Irish tune that I thought was an old Scottish tune. Then there was another tune called White Face, that Joe Thrift wrote. But there are hundreds and hundreds of tunes that we’ve heard that I will immediately say, “that’s a violin tune.”

CAROLE ANNE: I would love for Clarke to start writing some Minstrel tunes because it was a period of time that not a lot of tunes were produced. I should say that there are not a lot of tunes like Down South. It’s a very sophisticated evolution.

CLARKE: She’s speaking of a particular piece written and arranged by a particular banjoist in the ‘80s, Frank B. Converse, probably the finest banjo player at that time and maybe since. He was never recorded, but he did write down music and wrote many books all up to that time. He was the teacher’s teacher. He wasn’t a famous performer so much as he was a publisher of music and a composer.

CAROLE ANNE: And I think he brought that style of music to an incredibly wonderful complexity. But it was such a small period of time and there were so few people involved, there is not a large body of work.

CLARKE: It didn’t go anywhere from that.

CURLY: That was kind of the apex of Minstrel banjo.

CLARKE: That was it. After that book came out, that he put that in, 1887, no one wrote any more for that style.

CAROLE ANNE: So that’s why I was hoping that I could encourage Clarke to write some tunes in that style because he has all these techniques.

CLARKE: I’ll consider that.

CAROLE ANNE: I don’t think there is anybody else who can do it. And it’s just fabulous music.

CLARKE: I’ll take that as a challenge!

CAROLE ANNE: It’s on record!

The Instruments

CAROLE ANNE: The banjo I am playing is an invention that Curly and I have come up with over time. It has a 12½-inch pot from an 1893 S.S. Stewart Imperial Bangeaurine. It has a custom neck and a five-string style, but it has six strings, five long and one short.

When I first came to Arkansas and was playing guitar, I was playing the regular style for Old-Time, which is a bass note and a strum, bass note and strum, alternating bass notes. So I really wanted to play banjo, but I knew, in this lifetime, I was never going to be able to play melodic banjo to the tunes that we were playing. It just wasn’t possible for me, learning late in life, to be able to do that. And so, in a moment of naivete, I said to Curly, well, why don’t I just play the banjo the same way I’m playing the guitar and just play the bass note, but instead of the bass note strum I’ll play clawhammer style and alternate my bass notes. That was on a regular banjo, but through the years I’ve wanted lower notes, etc. So what has happened is, this particular style that I am playing kind of covers where the banjo plays and it also covers where the guitar plays, because this banjo is tuned like a guitar. What we’ve been able to do is play a lot of this music with this style of banjo that further makes it sound a little different to people today. It has those deep, low bass notes, but it also has the higher notes of the banjo, so it really fills out the sound. This has created another opportunity for us in our music where this style of banjo really fills out the sound and gives us the ability to capture people’s imaginations.

We’re not really sure if anyone has ever played quite this way that I’m playing. I’d say there probably were people that played similar to this, but this is definitely our home invention and the style of playing is my own invention.

FAF: And you call it...?

CAROLE ANNE: We don’t call it anything [lots of laughter]. At Cliff Top they named it The Big Boing. But you know it doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t played like that before. We just definitely developed it.

CURLY: I think people that are doing clawhammer that are trying to survive in jams with, frail chords, will do it. I’ll do it, Clarke will do it.

CLARKE: That’s what frailing is. That’s what they call frailing or flailing.

CURLY: But I don’t think anyone has ever perfected it to a science, and really gone haywire trying to make it as big as they could, like Carole has.

CLARKE: As an accompaniment. She doesn’t play solos on it.

CURLY: Carole has taken it to a different level than anything we’ve ever heard. Even on the old recordings we’ve never heard anyone play that.

CAROLE ANNE: And it’s big and it’s versatile because I play the same style for our Irish tunes, but I de-emphasize and emphasize different parts of it. When I’m playing hillbilly tunes, I will try to make it sound more twangy, more like a banjo. When I’m playing Irish tunes, I will de-emphasize the twanginess and encourage the guitar sound.

CURLY: Sometimes it almost sounds like a piano on some of the recordings we’ve done for Irish music. If you put a bowed bass with it, it definitely gets almost a piano sound.

CLARKE: I have a somewhat rare cello banjo.

FAF: That instrument was a show-stopper last night. It sounds like a tuba.

CLARKE: It is an instrument that was made here in the United States, in Philadelphia, anywhere from the 1880s to the 1890s. It was designed to be played in banjo orchestras of that time. It’s a 5-string banjo and it plays an octave lower in C tuning. I found an ad in a British banjo magazine, and the fellow had a cello banjo and I had been looking for one, and never expected to find one.

FAF: How long ago was that?

CLARKE: 1978. It was a newsletter for banjo players called The Banjoists’ Broadsheet. It was the kind of newsletter that was Xeroxed and stapled together. So there was this ad for the cello banjo, and he wanted to exchange it for a banjo to play Old-Time music on. I was in Denver at the time and went up to a fellow who used to work at the Ode factory, Mike Kemnitzer, who makes mandolins now. I said, “Can you put something together?” and he said he had all these scraps that they would throw out, these pots and necks that had small flaws on them that they didn’t want to re-work. They would just move on to the next one and toss them out. He collected them. And he put together a frailing-style, open back banjo for very little money, which I sent off to England. And, he sent me this in return. It was probably an even exchange; maybe there was a little money involved. He put it in two pieces: he sent the neck in a PVC pipe, and then a box for the 16-inch pot. So he didn’t make a foolish mistake of boxing it and having it smashed. He was clever. But anyway, I cheaply ended up with a beautiful banjo that had been played with the Aston Banjo Club in England, and they had used it for years.

CURLY: A priceless antique.

CAROLE ANNE: Did you mention how many there might be of those?

CLARKE: I’ve heard that there were 15 of them accounted for, by different makers. I wouldn’t know how many they made, but not very many.

FAF: Is that the lowest or deepest banjo you can get?

CLARKE: There’s a contra-bass banjo.

CAROLE ANNE: It has a stem on it and it stands upright.

CLARKE: People have also made them from bass drums. But generally banjo orchestras would use a mando-bass. I think the banjo bass was not practical. Maybe it wouldn’t stay tuned or was too bulky or something. But there weren’t very many of those. You’ll see them occasionally.

FAF: How do you get parts for the cello banjo?

CLARKE: You make your own parts. The bass notes are from a piano or harp.

CAROLE ANNE: Just an interesting note on the cello banjo, which we’re really excited about. We were able to meet Wayne Rogers of Goldtone Banjos and talk to him about the cello banjo. Clarke was not with us at the time, so we couldn’t show it to him, but we were able to take pictures later and send him measurements.

CURLY: And we played Classic banjo for him so he knew what it was.

CAROLE ANNE: So he would get an idea where the cello would fit in with what our sound is. We sent him all this information and talked to him a bit and got him excited about it. So he has committed to make 25 5-string cello banjos. He’s committed to one for us and one for himself and selling the 23. He is considering making it the Signature Old 78’s Cello Banjo. We’re pretty excited about it. And, then we wouldn’t have to travel around with a precious antique.

CURLY: Well, this one will have a 14-inch pot. It won’t have a 16-inch.

CLARKE: Hope it sounds as good.

CURLY: We do too.

CLARKE: How could it?

CAROLE ANNE: Yeah, it’s worth a try.

CURLY: We hope it sounds good but it will be able to fit probably in great big resonator banjo case. You can never make the neck too long.

FAF: Curly, do you have a favorite fiddle story?

CURLY: The best one is, we were on a banjo quest, and we went to Bernunzio Vintage Instruments which, oddly enough, his original store was across the street from the house I grew up in at Penfield, New York. And he’s one of the premier vintage instrument dealers in the country now. So we got to know him when we were back visiting my sister in Sodus, New York. And we went on this quest. We wanted to talk to John and see what we could figure out what we could do.

CAROLE ANNE: The point being I was playing a small banjo. We wanted a bigger banjo with a bigger bass line. So our quest was to find a bigger banjo.

CURLY: So we went in the door, and this is the second time we’d been to John’s. We went on a guitar quest earlier. So we went into John’s and as soon as we walked in the door, on the wall on the left was this incredibly beautiful Minstrel banjo. It was just a work of art. Back in the hotel room Carole goes, “Oh, it’s beautiful and it’s only $850!” [All laugh.] Actually, the pot was laying on his desk and the bangeaurine has a real short neck: it’s tuned to F instead of C. And the pot was lying on his desk. So we got all distracted and started talking about our project and John took us through and showed us some drum pots and we talked about pot size and what we really wanted to get from the project we were going to create. We knew we were probably going to have to make a neck. We already had Bob lined up to do it. So we were basically looking at pots, and scratching our heads. We must have spent 45 minutes wandering around. Finally, he was sitting there at the desk and we were sitting across from him, and the pot was sitting in between us. So finally I said, “Well, what about that one John? What’s that?” And he says, “That’s probably just what you’re looking for. I’ll give it to you AS IS for $550.” And the neck was broken. Then we said, “Well, what about the Minstrel banjo?” And he says, “I’ll give you 100 bucks off on that too.” So we threw it all together and gave him, like, $1,250 and took the whole pile of junk home.

FAF: Do you have a dream instrument that you’re looking for, or that you know is out there and if you had all the money in the world you’d buy it?

CURLY: A fiddle that won’t fall apart. That’s what I was doing when you found me today. I was starting to look for a fiddle that’s more sturdy than my super antique that I play. The one I play is a very, very old French fiddle that definitely has some structural problems. It has a fantastic, dark, wonderful sound. We just met those folks at Keller and we’re looking at that fiddle I was working on and Bob was playing. It was made in 2004.

FAF: Do you think you’ll buy a more modern fiddle?

CURLY: I’m just going to start looking. We have a lot of resources.

FAF: How do you know who is a good person to work on an old instrument?

CLARKE: Well, you make some mistakes and then it’s ‘why did I send it to him?’

CURLY: That is a never ending question. Jim Lansford thinks he’s found a great luthier up in Kansas, up by Lawrence, a young guy that he really swears by. Jim is a great fiddler and a great musician. He was in The Skirtlifters. I would trust what he says.

FAF: Clarke, is there an instrument that you are looking for?

CLARKE: I would like to upgrade my Stewart. I’m going to just keep looking around. Every banjo I get is different from every other one and has qualities that are nice. I just generally could use an upgrade in most of my instruments. You get afraid to take them out [antiques], for they can get stolen or put in the sun or somebody puts a box on it.

CURLY: My fiddle fear right now. Of all the instruments, fiddles are the most delicate. I’d like to have a fiddle for flying, to take on airplanes.

Playing Styles

FAF: So, do you consider yourself a straight, classic Old-Time fiddler?

CURLY: Yes. And, we’re branching. We’ll probably start playing a little more formal Raggy stuff. I was thinking of the St. Louis Tickle everybody’s playing. I woke up with that in my head the other day. We can match what I do to Classic Banjo if we want, and I’m playing Minstrel tunes. We’re going to do some of them in this afternoon’s set.

FAF: What differentiates the one style from the other?

CURLY: I think the way they dress [all laugh]. Old-Time fiddling, and really, the old, Old-Time Irish fiddling too, has just a ton of texture to it. I don’t hear that like you hear on the old recordings, the texture and the grit and the muscularity that comes out of the instrument. Our favorite Irish fiddler is John Vesey from Philadelphia. He grew up in County Sligo, Ireland. And it’s just like a big old chunk of meat when he plays, it’s just so big and thick. You hear that with the Old-Time fiddlers. And people are working on every note. The real good Old-Time players never stopped working. They were always trying to get the last little drop out of every note.

CLARKE: You don’t hear that in a lot of the playing where it’s so fast, just a slur of notes, instead of taking time and working the notes and pulling the potential out of the phrases and individual notes and bow strokes.

CURLY: Every note is a chance to do something. Some are faster than others, but every note is a chance to do something, and especially in flatted keys, because you’re not playing hardly any open strings and if your finger’s on the string, you can do something. You can shake it and wobble it and really bleed it and maybe dig it out of the bow and just try to get every last drop. And that’s the thing I hear in the old recordings, that I think is lost. And also in the Old Irish. That’s why I brought up John Vesey.

Everything’s a little glitzier but a little smoother now. Something is lost. The texture of it is different. We talked with Mitch Reed about Cajun fiddling. The notes are off—they’re actually out of tune. But boy it’s good.

CLARKE: But isn’t it just a different scale ...

CAROLE ANNE: We’ve talked about this. It creates a tension. Because if you want that pitch to be on and it’s slightly off, it pulls anybody who’s listening.

CLARKE: The scales have changed, what with fretted instruments and pianos and the things with fixed notes. The fretless instruments and the voice used to use different, untempered scales. Now it’s sort of evened out. Even some of the old accordions had a note that was in between two notes and could go to either key.

CURLY: What she’s talking about with the tension: we’ve talked with Mitch, the great bass player for Beau Soleil now, and his group Chari Vari was a super group of Cajun music, but he’s one of the few people that really still studies the old stuff. He’s given us a bunch of CDs of home recordings of Dennis Magee and Sadie Corville. A lot of it is based, Dennis Magee would hear a hillbilly tune, and you can actually recognize, like, Cotton-Eyed Joe, and he turns it into a Cajun fiddle tune, but boy it’s raw, and some of it’s just so fabulous. And it’s not necessarily ‘in tune’ but it’s that tension on the way to getting there combined with just the rawness of it. It’s fabulous. But it’s kind of lost too.

FAF: What about the instruments they use? I understand that there’s a Cajun fiddle.

CAROLE ANNE: We don’t know that much about it.

CURLY: It sounds to me like those old guys were just playing old violins.

CAROLE ANNE: And Mitch is playing a regular old violin and it sounds like that. Whatever those characteristics are, he’s learned them, he’s internalized them, they’ve become part of him and now they come out of him too.

CLARKE: Maybe you have seen some fiddles with, like, a horse head or something on them. Those, where were they made? They weren’t the best violins, but they were probably affordable and they looked interesting. A novelty.

Clobbering

FAF: Clarke, the foot tapping that you do, was that an integral part of the music as it was originally played? And do you have your feet miked?

CLARKE: Yes. And yes. When I was 18, I drove down from Chicago to Kentucky to learn how to tap my feet from Louis Lamb of Lexington. You call it Clobbering. I didn’t learn to switch feet like he did, because he could change over and do the same pattern in opposite. I never learned that. But it was something that was done by Uncle Dave Macon. I had originally seen something like it done by Jean Carignon, a Canadian, and he has a very different pattern out there.

CURLY: I think their pattern ... [he performs the tap]

CLARKE: It’s something like that. There is also a bounce involved, in a different section of the gallop, putting heels on a different part of it. But anyway, I’ve seen people do that in New England. So there’s that, the keeping the beat with the feet. Now there’s also, written in a piece of music that I found in an instruction book from the ‘90s, S.S. Stewart I think, and it says, “The foot should tap four times per measure as was the custom in Minstrel Shows.” And nowhere else did I ever see that. You see ‘feet up,’ and that’s the only reference that I have, four taps per measure. I do heel, toe: heel on my left and toe on my right [he demonstrates] when I do the Minstrel jigs; and the other ones, if I want to get more exciting, I'll do four. I wear leather-soled shoes to get a little slap on the broad-handled board that I bring that fits in front of the chair. So the sound man just puts a microphone up to it.

CAROLE ANNE: It’s great. Well, Curly was working on that for a while, but we were doing the French Canadian, but then he had a car accident and tore a ligament.

CURLY: I could do it now but it hurts.

CLARKE: If I really get going with it, my knees hurt.

CURLY: I just haven’t gotten back into it. I’m thinking of getting back into it but I’ll do it every now and then. But you really have to practice it because you can get spaced out and then you start to lose the beat.

CAROLE ANNE: We do it at a dance.

CLARKE: There are fiddle players who cannot tap their foot to the beat. And this is more than just keeping the beat, but a musician should be able to keep [he demonstrates], like, a bass drum pedal, keeping the beat, that is accurate. And they should practice that, because it involves the physical body, your body, and keeping up, as part of a musical instrument.

CURLY: I don’t tap my foot when I play the fiddle very often. When I’m playing the fiddle, I’m actually listening to it in stereo as it’s happening, coming out of my brain. And anything that interferes with that... I’m actually singing it to myself. But if I really start doing that [he taps], I’ll start doing it; I’ve been doing it for years...if I get real excited I will, but then I’ll get criss-crossed. But I’m not a regular foot tapper in general. Sometimes if I get real excited I’ll start tapping. But it comes from a different place when I’m playing fiddle.

FAF: So you’re not a professional clobberer like Clarke.

CLARKE: I’m not saying a fiddle player has to tap his foot, I’m saying he has to be able to do it. I’m not saying he has to do it every time he plays.

CURLY: I’ve seen some of the Old-Time banjo players back East tapping foot on the off-beat and I was horrified.

CLARKE: Some people will start playing in a band, but they won’t have a bass, and it sounds like, to me, that their back beat is the down beat. And it takes a while before somebody starts singing or something starts in that places the strong beats where they have a hole.

CURLY: Well, Bluegrass a lot of times will have that, the off beat chuck beat, like the dominant part of the rhythm section.

CLARKE: And you don’t hear much of that in the Old-Time recordings. You don’t hear a back beat like they play it today.

CURLY: Old-Time music accents the first and third beat...

CLARKE: And that gives us a different pulse than other bands.

CAROLE ANNE: So, what I’ve been trying to do is based on Rosalind Ming’s footwork, which is very famous. Curly was working on the French Canadian and Clarke’s got his thing going, but all that Rosalind did was go back and forth like this [she demonstrates]. And people talk about it because it just added so much. And it was for the same tune that Curly mentioned, Indian War Hoop. And that’s the one that I want to get down. And it’s actually hard to do because I’m playing that banjo.

CURLY: That big old heavy banjo.

CLARKE: And if your knees are going up, the instrument could be bobbing in your lap. So that could be fairly complicated.

CAROLE ANNE: But I’m going to get that one.

FAF: I had no idea this would be such a big question [all laugh].

CAROLE ANNE: Well, it adds a lot because it gives a whole other dimension of power [someone growls disapproval]. It pushes the tune to a whole other level.

CURLY: Well, the French Canadians like Jean Carignon, they just go [he demonstrates emphatically]. Name that tune and off they go and wham. I think Carignon will go [he continues demonstration] and he’s good at alternating it.

CLARKE: You get tired, so you want to vary it.

CURLY: La Bottine, they just tear it up. Those guys are just the greatest band there is. They’re incredible. We played with them at Black Mountain years and years ago.

FAF: I think I’ve about got it. Is there anything else? Did I leave any stones unturned?

CLARKE: The pattern I’m looking for, the Canadian pattern, is heel, heel toe heel, heel toe. Is that what you’re doing?

CURLY: I’m doing [he demonstrates] heel, toe toe, heel, toe toe.

CLARKE: Yeah, I don’t think that is his pattern, but it works. Sounds good.

CURLY: [Using both heels] I get a rolling pattern.

CLARKE: I watched closely a fellow in Vermont, at a fiddle contest, and I’m pretty sure that he went heel, heel toe, heel, heel toe, heel, heel toe.

CAROLE ANNE: The next thing I want to work on, if I ever get that down, I want to be able to be playing my banjo, and get up and start being able to flat foot dancing, while I’m playing the banjo. But I’ll have to have an electric pickup.

CURLY: [Referring back to Clarke] The thing about that is that you’re clobbering both your feet at the same time. The good thing about it is that both of your feet are coming up and your heel goes down, and then both of your feet are coming up...the one you heel with, you want to follow with your toe [he and Clarke are working it]. You’ve got it opposite, but that’s alright. You can just work it around in a circle. What I want to see is syncopated...

CAROLE ANNE: So here’s the thing about our collaboration: with Curly and me, and Clarke, we have so much stuff we want to do together. This is what happens when we have a rehearsal and there are so many different things we want to do together...

FAF: So how do you refer to yourselves, The Old 78’s with Clarke Buehling?

CAROLE ANNE: No, the three of us are The Old 78’s. When Curly and I travel without Clarke, we’re still The Old 78’s. Anybody who plays with us is The Old 78’s.