So, somebody asked me once, how'd you learn to play that thing? I thought I'd better write it down, in case I forget....
I already played guitar, and I bought a banjo in 1979. I tried to teach myself banjo out of the Earl Scruggs book, but that was a disaster. I went into Applegate's Music Shoppe and asked banjo teacher Dick Applegate "what am I doing wrong?" He said, "You're not studying under me, is what you're doing wrong...." So I took six months of lessons and got so I could play Foggy Mountain Breakdown. Playing the banjo exposed me to bluegrass music and specifically Ricky Skaggs, the super multi-instrumentalist. Skaggs plays anything with strings and had been the fiddler for Emmy Lou Harris for a while.
So I bought an old fiddle at the pawn shop for $200 in 1983. Seriously, I don't know how I afforded it, as I had just lost my job at Cat and $200 was a lotta scratch for me in 1983. I knew better than to try to teach myself, so I hooked up with the orchestral violin teacher at Woodruff High School. I took about six lessons, where he showed me how to tune up, he reset and flattened by bridge, and taught me "Boil 'Em Cabbage Down" and "Faded Love".... single string versions. He also taught me that the difference between a violin and a fiddle is the violinists cleans the rosin off his instrument after each session, whereas a fiddler never cleans the rosin off. Ever. He told me to learn to read music, handed me a sheaf of music scores and sent me off...
Armed with two simple songs, I entered a fiddle contest in Sheffield Illinois in the summer of 1984. I won second place. There were two of us in the contest. The winner was a 9 year old boy, playing "Jerusalem Ridge." He was really, really good (his parents were professional violinists). I really sucked. Then life happened and I never really got the fiddle out for about 30 years. School, work, kids, rugby... everything else seemed to take precedence.
Flash forward 30 years, and I retire to Tennessee. I discovered there were tons of bluegrass jams in my area, and one great one in my town. The first time I went I took my guitar and my old fiddle, with 30 year old rosin & strings. As I entered the Jam Leader told me to leave my guitar in the case ("we got plenty of those") and get the fiddle out. I stammered that I really didn't play, and besides I only knew two songs, Boil Em Cabbage and Faded Love. "We know those," he assured me and there I was, with my fiddle out ... at a jam. Gulp.
After quickly dispatching the only songs I even remotely knew (barely) they went off on another song and when it came around the circle, they looked to me to take a solo. "Uh, sorry, I'm new to bluegrass... I don't really play this thing... I've never heard that song before... so, uh... pass?" Nope. "Just play something," the jam leader said, "we don't care. We just like the fiddle sound." And that was that. On every song. Every week. I was expected to pick up the melody within the first two verses, then play a solo about the third time around. Man, did I suck. I didn't know scales or keys or where the hell to buy a capo to fit my fiddle (hint: no such thing).
Turns out the jam leader had retired back to his hometown of Jamestown after spending decades in Southern California. He was a past president of the California Old Time Fiddlers Association. He, like Ricky Skaggs, played anything with strings. And each week, he'd ask me if I knew this fiddle tune or that fiddle tune. Of course I didn't. I didn't know any fiddle tunes at first. And he'd give me an assignment: "Learn 'Lonesome Fiddle Blues' for next week... that's a fun one to play." No score. No notes. Sometimes he'd say "YouTube the Kenny Baker version" or recommend someone else's take. And I'd go home and work like hell to learn that song before the next week. And then he'd forget he'd mentioned it, or we'd not get to it or whatever. But then he'd have another old favorite as my weekly assignment.
Those old boys at Elroy's jam put up with alot of months of really bad fiddle playing. But they always did it with a smile. And encouragement. And I owe everything I am as a fiddle player to them.