Oldtime.ca: The Still

A Ramble
My Music Education

Every Christmas for I don't know how many years, I asked Santa Claus for a trumpet. I never told anyone else because I was embarrassed about it. At least I don't think I told anyone. At any rate, no one took it seriously, and Santa never brought me one.
           For years this characterized my experiences trying to play music. I loved making things, I could always draw, and I had an insatiable appetite for listening to all kinds of music, but I never had much success playing it. I tried learning piano from my Grandmother, who was formally trained at a conservatory, but I could never learn to read music. The pieces in the instruction book - standards like "She'll be Comin' Round the Mountain" and "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" - were so basic that I could easily memorize them, and as the pieces got more complicated, my ability to memorize simply got better. But I always felt guilty about this. When my grandmother was sitting next to me, I would pretend to read the music, which probably wasn't very convincing because whenever I couldn't recall exactly how a passage went, I would make it up.
           Piano lessons were always stressful, mostly because I never practised. This was partly out of laziness and partly out of fear that someone would hear me playing - and playing badly - so I eventually stopped. I only performed once in public, I think in grade three, at a little show put on in the afternoon at my school. I chose a weird piece that had this driving left-hand rhythm that was supposed to sound like "Indian" drumming. I'm not sure if it really happened like this or if I was projecting my anxiety, but I remember people laughing in the audience while I was playing. The other kids who performed that day had been playing for years, and it took me a long time before I could play music in front of anyone again.
           It didn't help that I was surrounded by kids who had been playing music since they were very young, and a lot of them were Suzuki-method prodigies. In junior high school this became a problem when I tried taking band class, where there is one teacher for an entire room, and students who already have a background on a given instrument are given that instrument. Originally I was in the strings class, but after being handed a violin for the first time and told that I didn't have the ear to play it, I was sent to band class where I asked if I could play trumpet. Well, there were kids there who already played trumpet. What about clarinet? Same thing. Because I was tall and had longer arms than anyone else in my grade seven class, I was told that I was best suited to playing trombone. The irony of this struck me only later on when I realized that just like the violin, the trombone has no stops and must be noted by ear.
           It was a year or so after dropping band class that I asked my father for a guitar and, knowing that I was serious about it, he drove out to this music store on the edge of nowhere and I chose one. It was a pretty decent acoustic guitar, and was soon followed by an electric guitar. Another brief stint with lessons made me familiar with the basic chords, but it wasn't the music I wanted to play, and the teacher kept trying to get me to sing, which I hated. To this day, when I mention old Mr. Smith, my mother inevitably starts singing Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You," one of the songs he adapted to the guitar, presumably in an attempt to make the music relevant to his young students. Looking back on it, and remembering the kind of guitar he owned, I think he most likely played swing something in the style of Homer & Jethro, which I probably would have found more interesting.
           As it turned out, I learned the most about music on my own, trying to figure out how to play songs I liked, and noodling around with my best friend, who would play all sorts of strange chord progressions while I tried my best to "solo" through the changes. Despite our arguments about who was and wasn't in tune, we did pretty well, and it was his interest in the music of the Grateful Dead that eventually led me to hearing David Grisman's collaborations with Jerry Garcia, as a duet and as part of Old and In the Way. This is what sparked my interest in bluegrass and traditional American music.
           When I was in my early twenties I bought my first mandolin, which was a barely playable piece of junk that sat under my bed for a long time, and was a good argument against the whole concept of "beginner" instruments. Aging in its case didn't make it sound any better, so when my interest in bluegrass mandolin peaked again after buying my first Bill Monroe record, I upgraded my instrument and started to figure it out in earnest.
           And I learned it on my own.
           After realizing how many old time and bluegrass musicians learned informally, and how many were basically self-taught, a whole new world of music opened up for me. The feeling that I was somehow musically inadequate because I couldn't read "standard" notation disappeared (tablature systems are actually older, I discovered to my delight), and all the years of making things up suddenly had greater relevance. I wasn't just "noodling" around all that time, I was practising, though I didn't know what for.
           A woman I happened to meet through a jazz bassist eventually introduced me to the Pacific Bluegrass and Heritage Society (PBHS) in Vancouver some years ago, and before long my wife and I were attending the weekly jams. Not long after that I was president. Bluegrass and old time associations are completely unique in my experience, and playing with other people just for the sake of it made me realize that music could be an end in itself. Soon after joining the PBHS, I met some old time players, who seemed to possess something old and mysterious in their music that intrigued me. Because you can fairly easily produce a full sound playing banjo alone, I began learning clawhammer and old time styles, and my music collection is now populated with various old men playing banjos - Dock Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb, Hobart Smith - men who similarly played music for its own sake, but who gained some measure of fame later on their lives.
           Unlike them, I wasn't surrounded by music when I was young, I didn't grow up in the rural south, and I can't even claim that my parents were musicologists who surrounded me with the sounds of traditional music as an alternative to mass culture (unless Anne Murray or the Irish Rovers count). No, I was brought up in the suburbs of Toronto at a time when the Boy Scouts still sold Christmas trees, the Avon lady still came around, milk was still delivered, people still had neighbourhood parties, and nobody locked their doors at night - and sometimes not even when they went away on vacation. Don Mills had a United Church in every neighbourhood and still had a retro-1950s feel well into the 1970s. But all of that was changing when I was young and, for better or worse, that way of life is gone, along with that of my grandparents, and their grandparents before them, ad infinitum.
           Maybe when I'm old I'll be as dynamic a performer as Dock and Roscoe and Hobart, but I know for certain that the world I grew up in will seem as distant to future generations as the world of these men does to a suburban northerner like me. But the point is not whether we have lived these other lifeways, but whether we have imaginations that are generous enough to accommodate and understand them and all their complexity in relation to our own experiences. And this is what oldtime.ca is all about - comprehending that what was relevant to people before us is not necessarily any less relevant to our lives today. Too much has been thrown away over the course of this century, whether in the name of progress, modernity, or the new. The belief that we can somehow cast off the past as we would an old change of clothes is a pervasive myth in our culture that has done more damage than good. Oldtime.ca is about embodying this awareness through music - not through politics, not by talking about it, but through practice.

- Graham Blair