About fiddlehub.com
A little background info:
People have asked me to put up a little personal background information for those who might be interested. Glad to oblige, and I'll apologize in advance for the length. For better or worse, I've been around a while, so even an outline takes up a fair amount of space.
Very early days.
When I was very young, I didn't care much about music. My parents didn't play or sing, and there wasn't much chance for a child living in Indiana in those days to hear much music. Then, in the summer of my 5th year, while visiting my grandparents on the family farm in Jonesville, Virginia, I heard Earl Scruggs play the banjo on the radio. I still remember how that felt. I couldn't believe it. It was the most exciting, compelling sound I had ever heard. From that moment on, I knew what I wanted to do--I wanted to play music, and I wanted it to have the same fire and feeling that I heard coming out of that old radio. As time went by, I learned to do lots of things besides play music (things like getting an education and practicing law), but those other activities were just things I did. They were never who I was. I was always a musician. If you're a musician, you know what I mean. What you really want to do most of the time is play music. You can't help it; and you don't want to help it.
Teaching and touring.
Throughout grade school, high school and college, I played mostly guitar. For a time I studied classical guitar at the Jordan School of Music at Butler University in Indianapolis. Throughout college and grad school, I taught hundreds of budding players in private lessons. When I got out of the service, I toured the country with a number of groups, playing various instruments, including guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin and bass. My wife Jane and I had met while I was in the service, and for awhile she toured with me and played bass. We married while on the road and had a lot of fun playing music together; but after a couple of years we decided that the road was no place for a family. We quit and I went to grad school, then law school, and Jane went to work to keep us going. I spent my legal career in private practice, and during those years I played music as often as I could. Jane and I have two great kids (Graham and Sionan), and just this past July, a grandson (Seamus). Life for us truly rich, and we enjoy it more than is really fair.
Why the fiddle?
I took up the fiddle about 35 years ago. At first it was just another instrument, but before too long a strange thing happened--the better I learned to play, the more I wanted to play. Pretty soon, I found myself sawing away on the fiddle day after day, and leaving my other instruments in their cases. It wasn't that I didn't want to play the guitar or the banjo; it was just that as a young lawyer with a young family, I didn't have a lot of spare time. When I did carve out a few minutes, I couldn't resist using them for the fiddle. These days I have plenty of time for playing, and I still pretty much just play the fiddle.
Appalachian string band style.
In the early days of my fiddling life, I concentrated on the Appalachian string band style of play--the so-called "Old Timey" sound. I always loved that style, and I still do. That's why so many of the tunes on this website are from that tradition. Not long after I started on the fiddle, I recorded an LP of traditional American music on which I played all the instruments, including the fiddle. Here are a couple of tunes from that record, one featuring fiddle and the other banjo.
Irish traditional style.
Of course, the southern American fiddle tradition owes a great deal to traditional Irish music, but until 1990 or so I had not really focused on the Irish styles of fiddling. Then I heard the great Kevin Burke play on a record, and for me it was another "Earl Scruggs" moment. I just had to learn that style (or something like it--nobody sounds like Kevin Burke); so I started making pilgrimages to fiddle camps to study with great players (Eilene Ivers, Kevin Burke, Seamus Connolly, Brian Conway, and others), I spent hundreds of hours joining in Irish music sessions in various parts of this country and Ireland, and I put in the time necessary to learn the repertoire and the ornamental dynamics that bring the Irish fiddle style to life. In the early nineties I also joined a great Irish traditional band known as Odd Men Out. We focused on the session tunes and had a fabulous time. The band is no longer together, but these days, when left to my own devices, I play mostly in the Irish style.
The ideal learning situation.
So how did these experiences lead to this website? It really boils down to this: I spent a long time and a lot of effort learning to play the fiddle--and I think the process, especially in the early going, was a lot harder than it needed to be. I was already a professional string player before I played my first note on the fiddle, but I still made mistakes and wandered off on detours that really slowed my progress. The fiddle, after all, is not intuitive; and there are many opportunities to learn things wrong. Bad habits have to be unlearned eventually, and they block good progress. Looking back, I'm sure it would have gone more smoothly, and been a lot more fun, if I'd had constant access to a good teacher--someone who was always there to show me, time and time again, exactly what to do and how to do it. It would have been great to have a mentor who would break things down into small parts, explain them in detail, and play them with me, again and again, until I got them right. In a perfect world, I would have had someone there to help me night and day, for 20 minutes or 3 hours at a stretch, whenever I felt like playing.
The ideal learning website (I hope).
Of course, in real life that kind of access to a good teacher is not available anywhere, at any price. But a few months ago it occurred to me that exactly that kind of access might be made available in cyberspace. I thought that using modern interactive internet technology, it might be possible to come very, very close to this ideal learning situation. I decided to try to build such a resource, thinking that if I succeeded, I could make it available to everybody and a lot of learning fiddlers would have an easier time than I had. Fiddlehub.com is the result. I'll always be trying to improve it, but I've tried to build a place on the internet where you can go, regularly work on your fiddle skills, become a better player, and have a great time doing it. I hope you'll contact me and let me know if I've succeeded.