Pete’s Word

Robert Burns

Today is Robert Burn’s birthday, a man who, more than any other, typifies Scotland and its culture. Any fan of Bill Monroe should take note of this, but I have an extra reason. As a former resident of Santa Barbara’s Mountain Drive community where I performed with my friends as The Scragg Family, I have many fond memories of celebrating Robert Burns Night at Vernon Johnson’s residence there, called “The Castle”, it did indeed resemble a medieval banquet hall. We all showed up in costume to help celebrate. The 7-Up Bottling Company even had a Scotts pipe band who showed up to “pipe in” the Haggis, proudly carried in on a platter by its creator, George Grayson, chef (back then) at the Miramar Hotel.

What follows is a little more background, for those who care about true civilization . . .

WHAT is it with the Scots and fire traditions? Nearly every celebration seems to revolve around fire, which makes it pretty ironic that among the only ones that does not is actually dedicated to a man called Burns.The Burns in question is Robert – Rab or Rabbie – and is none other than our national bard. Robert Burns, the ploughman’s son from South Ayrshire who tilled the soil and tugged at our heart with his poems and songs.
He is remembered on his birthday, 25 January, all across Scotland, the UK
and the world, when celebrants gather to give thanks. And how better to
praise the great man than to sit down, feast and drink and generally have a
good “craic”. Deciding what to eat at the very first Burns Supper was never
going to be much of a problem. It’s not as if Rabbie wrote reams of
Epicurean poetry. There could never have been a moment when the host
considered lamb chops or fillets of sea bass. After all, this is the man
who wrote the immortal words:

“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin’-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,”

He was writing, of course, about our proud national dish, the delicately
flavoured, oh so sumptuous haggis. Yes, some great people are remembered
with medals, others have a library named after them. Scotland’s greatest
ever poet is remembered by a stodgy meat pudding made from the sheep’s
pluck wrapped up tightly in a stomach. Yum… The haggis is only the first
part of this great tradition. A proper Burns Supper follows a very strict
way of doing things. Whether Moses actually had the programme dictated to
him on top of Mount Sinai along with the Ten Commandments is debatable …
but possible. So back to the supper. A bit like a recipe, it must be
prepared properly:

Take one group of guests, and although it is not strictly necessary, it is
jolly good form if they dress – or at least bedeck – themselves in some
small way, with tartan. The meal starts with grace – in this case the Selkirk Grace. Short, sweet, effective and to the point. “Some hae meat and canna eat And some would eat that want it But we hae meat, and we can eat
Sae let the Lord be thankit” After grace comes a wee gless o’ something”, followed by cock-a-leekie (chicken with leek) soup. Then comes the big moment, the reason you’ve travelled out in a cold January night, the one, the only parade of the haggis. Presented high on a platter, carried by the proud chef, piped in and given the full “Address to a Haggis” treatment, usually by the host.

When the whole ceremony is completed, including the slashing open of the
steamy haggis with a skean-dhu, the dish is served up with mashed neeps and tatties. (The real aficionados substitute whisky for salt and pepper, but
you need a stout heart for that particular condiment.) Once the meal is consumed, there is just time to re-fill your glasses and lubricate your voice box in readiness for a song. Take your pick, but make it Burns. After the singing comes the speeches which come thick and fast (if you’re lucky), or long and tedious (if you haven’t picked your speakers well.) Intersperse these speeches with liberal dose of songs, reminiscences and, yes, more drink. By now it’s late and you will be feeling rather “tired and emotional”. The evening is brought to a close when the chairman thanks his guests. Drink. Toasts the chef. Drink. Refill. Toasts the piper. Drink. And so on until everyone staggers to their feet for a rousing rendition of “Auld Lang Syne”.

>Does anyone know when bluegrass first appeared in California,
>that is when the first California bluegrass band made an appearance?
>Many thanks in advance.

You actually have two questions there, since “first bluegrass” and “first
California BG Band” are two distinct possibilities.

Bill Monroe traveled to California in the mid 1950s, playing venues like
the Santa Anita Racetrack, Hollywood’s Palamino Club, and the Ventura Co.
Fairgrounds. This was before bluegrass made it big in the colleges (starting 1961-62), as Bill’s audiences out here in the 50s was mainly blue collar workers:the oil bizz, aerospace model and airframe builders, and home construction.

(BTW: this leads into an interesting question I’ve been thinking about:
How much did Bill’s acceptance by the urban college and folk crowds affect
his music? Certainly he recorded some “folk” material he never would have
in earlier times, but he also was the only “first generation” band leader
to reach out to urban, northern, and West coast musicians to contribute to
the sound of his music.) Sorry for the digression, but I spend a lot of
time thinking about questions like this.

Early TV in Los Angeles featured shows like “Cal’s Corral” with So. Calif.
Car Dealer Cal Worthington (remember “My Dog Spot”?), who did a lot to further the bluegrass music scene on the air. Early bands featured on Cal’s show (and car commercials) were Don Parmely’s “Golden State Boys”, and a group known as “The Country Boys”, later to evolve into “The Kentucky Colonels”.

In the Bay area, the first bg band I remember would be the Redwood Canyon
Ramblers, but there may have been others.

This is from a recent discussion on Fiddle List [click here] about various ways to obtain drone notes on the fiddle…

>The old-time sound of Sally Gooden is important to me, just the way it
>is to Glenn — not the sound a listener hears, but the sound “next to my
>ear” as the fiddlemakers say.

———-

John mentions re-tuning the fiddle as one method of getting the “pinky drone” effect; eg. on Sally Gooden, as well as his method of fourth position playing.

Eck Robertson, in a photo I took at UCLA in 1964.

In 1976, I produced an Lp recording of all of Eck Robertson’s Victor 78s,
including his “Sallie Gooden” – recorded July 1, 1922 as a solo fiddle piece. During the process of remastering that recording for the Lp, I purchased a mint copy of the original Victor Talking Machine Co. 78 RPM disc (Victor 18956, matrix No. 26664-1) from David Freeman at Floyd, VA. I listened to that original, and my 15 IPS analog tape copies, many, many times, trying to figure out that mysterious “drone” sound which gave that performance such a haunting, ethereal quality. (It remains one of my favorite fiddle recordings.)

I believe that Eck recorded that piece in “standard” tuning (and have heard field recordings made by Michael Bass of Eck playing it the same way in 1965), and of course used his pinky to get the drone note. However, I believe also that some mechanical fluke occured that morning to add a sort of “accoustical halo” to the sound. That recording was made mechanicaly, not electricaly, using a recording horn (sort of a reverse megaphone) to amplify the sound waves enough to move the steel recording stylus across the wax of the master disc. This is interesting in itself: the force generated to cut the master came from Eck’s violin, just as in all recordings made before the use of microphones, ca. 1925/26. It occured to me that there might have been some resonance in the mechanical linkage of the horn to the stylus that resonated with the precise note Eck choose for his drone note, thus creating that ethereal effect. So we are endowed with that amazing fiddle recording, perhaps, because the Victor engineer had a scew loose. . .

-Peter

http://www.BlueGrassWest.com

PS – “Any bird can build a nest, but it isn’t every bird that can lay an egg.”
-Stan Laurel

Annie Eisenberg in today’s New York Times writes about a couple of new turntables recently released to help transfer music from Lps to the digital formats, such as .wav and .mp3 files.

One, the Ion USB or, more formally, the iTTUSB ($199 list price) comes complete with a USB cable that plugs directly into the computer via a digital feed, and a software package that enables people to burn CDs from the resulting data. A few years ago, when I was first setting up a system to burn CDs from Lps, I was surprised to find out how easily turntables were to find, even ones that still play 78 RPM discs. One of the reasons turntables are still manufactured is the burgeoning DJ market; audiophiles are still making claims that the good old analog sound of their Lps is superior to that of the digitized world. I wound up buying a Numark turntable, which I hooked up to my old amp, running an analog cable to a special sound card (the Echo Mia), which uses good analog to digital (A->D) converter chips. Buying a pro-quality sound card really helps in capturing more of that original sound.

For digital audio software, I’ve been using Cool Edit (now owned by Adobe and sold under the name Audition). The software takes a while to learn, but certainly helps in seperating the tracks into useable files, removing clicks and pops, and even re-equalizing the sound for special purposes. Plan omn spending at least three hours per Lp in transferring the sound and burning the disc.

-Peter

>I am working with a young lady who is a classically trained violinist.
>She is a very good player, and is also very good at improvisation. She
>would like to be able to play bluegrass and country. When she tries, it
>still comes out violin. Being a saxophone player myself, I have reached
>the limits of my knowledge. I would like to get her some assistance.
>So my question is, ‘how do you turn a violinist into a fiddle player?’
>Are there any effective training programs available? We have looked for
>teachers in the Northern Illinois/Southern Wisconsin area, but have not
>had much luck finding one. I would welcome advice.
>

Saxophone!? I was doing a wedding gig in a park a few years ago when a guy
(who said he was just out of the service) came by and listened to my band.
He said he enjoyed our music and asked if it was OK to sit in – with his
tenor sax. I said “sure” (I’d had a bit of the bubbly by then and was
feeling no pain) and launched into OBS. The guy took a fantastic break
without so much as batting an eye! (I’ve had tuba players as band members,
and will definitely NOT turn down an audition from a sax player, not any
more I won’t!)

Back to fiddles.

First of all, try talking her out of bluegrass fiddling. It’s *very*
addictive and tend to boggle the mind of a classically-trained violinist.

Secondly, get her to FIDDLE-L [ http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/fiddle-
l.html ] which is a discussion list with members from both camps; they tend
to talk for months at a time about switching from Bach to BG. It also
happens to be one of the best places to talk about old time and bg music,
with not nearly as much fluff as here on BGRASS-L. The downside there is
that they will also spend herds of words talking about which kind of rosin
to use with left-handed fiddles, etc.

Thirdly, she may want to visit the website of Gilles Apap, one of the
world’s current top violinists, who is also adept at Gypsy, Jazz, Old-Time,
Hindustani, and Irish fiddle styles. [ http://www.gillesapap.com/ ]. He’s
making inroads into bluegrass fiddling as well, with a few setbacks, such
as learning a hot version of Sally Gooden from a bg fiddler friend, but
plays the guy’s mistakes along with the “proper” notes.

Perhaps better she stay in the “classical” field. . .

-Peter