Folk music has interested me for years. My dat used to play
fiddle in a family group for barn dances back in Iowa many years ago.
His dad played mandolin, and two of my dad's uncles played fiddle,and
another played piano. My dad's grandfather played fiddle, winning
the Iowa state fair fiddle contest numerous times till they asked him
not to enter every year. When his grandkids or other kids would
come to vidie, hie would show them into the
music room where there was a piano and a fiddle, and ask not "Do you
play?", but "Which do you play?" So it just runs in our family.
Bluegrass was the folk music for me in college: a five-piece band
called the Echo Mountain Boys, and a
little three-piece old-time fiddle tunes group called the Pocatee
Pickling Company that we took to the
Smithsonian bicentennial festival on the mall in 1976. And there
was old-time jazz group, a la Grappelli, but it was mostly bluegrass
and old
fiddle tunes.
I made one CD to help a student or two with learning old fiddle tunes,
and it seemed a good idea to develop that some more and make it
available on the web.... ijust to see the level of interest out
there. So, here's the Fiddle Teaching CD with 37 songs on
it. I had planned to include seven more tunes, but those are
copyrighted and at
$42.50 per song, seven of those mounts up into
dollars. So, those may go onto a second Fiddle Tunes
CD, I hope. Anyway,
just click on the link below to hear samples of what's on the CD.
