Fiddle:. Vivian Wagner
the Suzuki books just like I had. His lessons were much like my own had been: long, difficult, and repetitive. It takes a long time to make anything like music on the violin. He worked hard at it, though, his blond head bobbing up and down while he stretched his fingers to play the notes. Some days he’d get frustrated, and many days in between lessons he didn’t want to practice. He seemed to want to continue the lessons, though, so I kept taking him. During his lessons, Rose and I sat on little folding chairs off to the side. She’d color pictures, and I’d read a book or absentmindedly stare at the scuffed, cracked linoleum.
One day, though, the year after my mom died, and the summer I turned forty, something happened that brought me to attention.
“Want to learn some fiddle?” I heard her ask William, a hint of Appalachian lilt in her voice. She tossed her straight brown hair back, looking at him brightly, defiantly.
“Sure,” he said. “I guess so.”
She pulled out Mel Bay’s Deluxe Fiddling Method, by Craig Duncan, a spiral-bound music book with a happy-looking man in a plaid flannel shirt fiddling on the cover.
“I have this book, and we could play a little from it,” she said. “I grew up playing fiddle with my grandpa, and I think you might like it.”
She turned to the first song in the book, “Bile Them Cabbage Down.”
“Let’s start with this one,” she said. “I’ll play it through first, and then you can try.”
She played through the little tune, with its double-stops and simple bowing pattern. And while she played, I watched and, for the first time in one of his lessons, listened.
“See?” she showed William. “It’s just second finger on the A string, and then third finger.” She played through the first few measures, and William copied her. Then a few more, and he copied again.
At the end of the lesson, while William put his violin away, I went over to give Angela her $12 check.
“I might want to learn some of that fiddling,” I said nonchalantly, noncommittally, not wanting to reveal how much, suddenly and inexplicably, I wanted to learn to play fiddle. I really wanted to learn fiddle. I wanted to fiddle more, perhaps, than William did. Fiddling suddenly seemed vitally important, even necessary, for me to learn. Perhaps it had to do with grief for my mom’s death, and with the fact that I was just starting to feel the inklings of a midlife crisis coming on. All I knew consciously, though, was that I had to learn it.
“Okay,” she said, looking at me a little strangely. “You can play along, if you want.”
And so at the next lesson, I brought along my violin. William, Angela, and I played a bit together after the Suzuki part of each lesson. I could tell William thought it kind of odd that Mom was joining in, but he seemed to take it in stride. Over a few weeks, we worked more on “Bile Them Cabbage Down,” and then progressed to “Ida Red,” “Old Joe Clark,” and my favorite, “Devil’s Dream,” a whirlwind of sixteenth notes that sounded really quite fiddle-y. At home, he and I practiced our new tunes together, and the fact that I played along seemed not to bother him. It actually seemed to make practicing more fun for him. If Mom liked playing violin, well, then, maybe he did, too.
And as I played through those fiddle tunes, something strange began to happen. My fingers running through the melodies and the double-stops, my bow scratching out centuries of folk music transcribed and simplified for beginners, I felt like I’d found something I hadn’t even known I’d lost.
Chapter 2
Mountain Heir
On a hot Saturday afternoon, my husband, kids, and I headed east out of New Concord on Interstate 70 in our Honda Odyssey, before exiting south and going deep into Ohio’s hill country, first on a narrow paved road, next a gravel road, and then a dirt road. We passed stretches of thick woods, trailers, pickup trucks, and dogs tied to trees with lengths of rusty chain.
“Where are we going again?” Rose asked, always curious about what we were up to, and why.
“It’s a bluegrass festival,” I said, not really knowing how to explain bluegrass to her. I wasn’t sure I even knew what it was. A few weeks earlier I’d told my dentist, who played mandolin in a band, that I’d been learning to play fiddle. He mentioned the Mountain Heir Bluegrass Festival, down in the countryside outside of Old Washington. After a couple of Google missteps, as I looked for “Mountain Air” and “Mountain Hair,” I finally found it: Mountain Heir, held at the Old National Trail Campground. It intrigued me. I’d never been to a bluegrass festival, but I thought it might be a chance to catch some fiddling, and to explore the Appalachian hills that were still pretty mysterious to me, even after all these years of living in southeastern Ohio.
I turned forty that summer, and though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, I was on the edge of a midlife crisis. I was evaluating myself, and my life, thinking about what direction I wanted to head in the future. I was happy enough with my life, with being a wife, a mom, and a professor, but I had a feeling that there was more I could do. More I could explore. More I could learn. And though I didn’t quite know why, fiddling seemed to hold the key to this self-exploration.
This festival, I’d thought, would be a chance to investigate fiddling, and also to expose the kids to fiddling. I thought it might be good for them to be exposed to the music, culture, and people right around them in Appalachia. So, I’d convinced them and my husband to go along with me to check out the festival. Somewhat reluctantly, they agreed, and there we were, bumping along on a dirt road headed into the wilderness.
“A bluegrass festival?” William asked. “Is there going to be any music we like there?”
“I don’t know, William,” I said, feeling exasperated. He liked Coldplay, Muse, the Beatles. Sure, he played violin, and we’d been playing the fiddle music with Angela, but that wasn’t the kind of music he wanted to listen to on a summer afternoon. I looked back at him, slumping in his seat with exaggerated boredom. I could almost hear his thought: Mom’s lost it. Even Rose, in her sweet way, looked at me curiously.
“We’re going to see what we see, and that’s it,” I said firmly, matter-of-factly, as if I had any idea what we would see. Besides, it wouldn’t do any of us any harm to try something new.
Rose shrugged. “Okay,” she said, happy to be along for the ride.
William sighed melodramatically, turned up the volume on his iPod, and looked out the window at the run-down wooden shacks, cars on blocks, and outside dogs. Usually when we went anywhere, we went to Cleveland to see their grandparents, or the Colony Square Mall in Zanesville to see a movie, or to Ruby Tuesday in Cambridge. Not to backwoods campgrounds.
“Are you sure you know where we’re going?” my husband asked, glancing at the MapQuest printout I held on my lap.
“Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. “It’s up here; just keep following this road.”
He kept driving on a road that had become just two tire tracks through the dry grass. Finally, we arrived at the Old National Trail Campground.
As we drove in, we saw rows of RVs, and the air through the open windows of our van smelled thick with the wood-smoke from campfires. We parked and got out, following the sound of bluegrass music up and over the hill to a shady area where mostly seniors sat on lawn chairs. They were listening to a band playing on a makeshift trailer stage. I immediately realized our mistake: we hadn’t brought any chairs. I asked one of the women working at the concession stand if she knew where we could find some.
“Just a minute, I have a few in our trailer,” she said, eyeing me as the outsider I felt I was, but with a look suggesting I wouldn’t be one for long if I just proved myself in some way I didn’t quite understand. “How many do you need?”
Embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of bringing chairs, I sheepishly told her four. She smiled, looking at me and then at my less-than-enthusiastic family, and said she’d be right back.