1. The Winter of 2012-13, a long and pesky one by Southern standards, mercifully withdrew its cold, and warm air made its first appearance of the year on the 9th of March, a day of dappled sunlight, fresh breezes, and a fiddlers' convention.
Over half a thousand people would come and go over the course of the day to the Lindsay Street Hall in downtown Chattanooga for the Great Southern Old Time Fiddlers' Convention. Many could be seen carrying a fiddle in each hand, walking purposefully down Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard to compete in the day's musical contests for honest-to-god cash prizes, to jam, to listen, to meet old and to make new friends.
Brown paper signs, taped to the masonry of the restored church known as the Lindsay Street Hall, indicated where to pay admission and where to sign up for contests. They looked as if they had always been there. At the admissions table, attendees were offered friendly greetings, directions, advice, the green wristbands which would serve as tickets, a historical film on DVD, and free Moon Pies.
Beyond the table a few fiddlers gathered on the elevated lawn on the southern side of the Hall. The barbecued chicken vendors were rattling their cookware and firing up their charcoal grill. On the other side of the lawn, the bartender, Crystal, arranged a display of beers, sodas, and bottled water. Lawn chairs and open fiddle cases scattered on the grass, and would accumulate in ever greater numbers until bartender and barbecue had gone with the sunlight to some other part of the globe that was not downtown Chattanooga.
2. Inside the hall, an amber light filtered through the green and yellow of the stained glass windows, augmented gently by the small light bulbs shaped like candle flames that dotted the metal ceiling, which a milky tint of paint unified with the walls, giving one an overall impression of being inside a wedding cake. Only the wood floor was not white: it shone with the color of caramel and clattering shoe heels. All these surfaces rebounded the voices of the people who were now beginning to enter the room, gather in conversational clusters, and set down fiddle cases one end at a time, with double booms.
When people meet at a fiddler's convention, their conversations begin in the middle of things. They know each other from other conventions, other concerts, from trading and repairing instruments. Musical events such as this are the entrances to a second orbit of time, inside the larger orbit of work and family. When one enters this second orbit, there is an instantaneous renewal of the memory, and all the old names and tunes and faces come back to mind like blossoms in the spring. I entered the old-time orbit in the otherwise empty Lindsay Street Hall with David Varnell, a kind fellow and excellent banjo player, who, without preamble, resumed the perennial debate of old-time music versus bluegrass.
As we chatted, Matt Downer, chief operator of the convention, his whiskers not the shape but the character of a lion's, passed through at a swift pace. He was carrying numerous organizational burdens of the convention on his shoulders. As the white-mustached Varnell sipped his Fresca, and I still held my instruments, we concluded that although we like some old bluegrass, we don't care for the new stuff. For us, it's old-time all the way. I suspect that sentiment is shared by the majority of attendees of the Great Southern.
Mr. Varnell, moving on to other topics, mentioned a number of musicians and groups, nearly all of which I'd never heard. Laughing, he said, "You just play this stuff, you don't study it, do you?" While that isn't entirely true, it was certainly a propos, because Mr. Downer was reentering the room, signaling that he and I--the Old Time Travelers--were to take the stage immediately to signal the beginning of the convention.
Thus 10 lively hours of competition, concert, concessions, and conversation were set in motion.
3. Attendees of the Great Southern soon discover that it is not a concert so much as a total immersion in music. Everywhere is behind the scenes. There are constant performances inside and outside, on the grounds and off, as fiddlers venture into the city and return to the convention like bees to the hive.
Modern event planners would be envious of the fiddlers' convention's natural interactivity. Anyone can perform, either to compete for the cash prizes at stake, or just for the hell of it. The Hall is alive with the sound and movement of performers ascending to and descending from the stage in cross patterns. The doors stay wide open all day long. The sounds of passing cars enter and exit with the cool Spring breezes and scraps of outdoor conversation. Spectators come and go, producing a murmur of voices and shuffling feet as though they belonged to a single entity. The ringing strings of fiddle and banjo rest upon the compound of these gentle sounds like a fleck of gold on a mass of cotton.
4. Another year of research has yielded a bumper crop of knowledge about the original Great Southerns that were held in Chattanooga in the 1920s and 30s. Many recently-discovered photographs of past legends of the convention made their debut this year, along with photocopies of the many articles that Chattanooga papers once printed about the convention. Among the many fiddlers pictured in these photos, displayed museum-style on a card table at stage-right, were featured Saw Mill Tom Smith, Gid Tanner on Umbrella Rock, and Clayton McMichen, who with fiddle tucked under his arm is kissing a whiskey barrel.
Reading a few of the articles, one eventually comes across differences between the old and the present-day conventions. The crowds were ten times larger back in the 20s. There were also disputes among the contestants that inspired exchanges of editorial vitriol. But one aspect of the old conventions seemed especially strange to me: the oldest fiddle contest. Presumably, contestants would present their fiddles and their respective ages to a panel of judges who would determine which was really made first in a distant craftsman's shop in a European city or town that would have been part of a kingdom predating the modern-day nations of Italy and Germany.
The nearly mystical powers possessed by the old tunes, in some cases hundreds of years old, is possessed equally by the wood and glue of the instruments themselves. Though there is no longer an oldest-fiddle contest, the fiddles are no less displayed than they once were. To listen to the tones of the instruments--in addition to the skill and soul of the performers--is one of the essential pleasures of the convention. From whispery to resonant, faint to bold; woody, gemlike, waterlike; squealing, singing, cooing;--each instrument is as individual as the person who plays it.
Piles of them accumulate along the walls; the lack of storage area necessitates the practice. But there is a commensurate trust among the crowd, which has its root in the common experience of fiddle ownership. The bond between fiddle and fiddler is as affectionate as that between horse and rider, and the crime of stealing a fiddle is poison to the spirit.
5. The two performances by professional musical entertainers were as informal as the performances of the contestants. Brittany Haas has a presence that is as modern and friendly as you could imagine, with a warm and frequent smile. She seems to embody the title of a tune she played: "Queen of the Earth, Child of the Stars." Her short and varied set enchanted with its simplicity. Leroy Troy, the Tennessee Slicker, clad in overalls and wide-brimmed felt hat, mixed harmonic grace, percussive rollick, and avuncular sleight-of-banjo in his performance, which abutted the banjo competition.
The latter's laurels were claimed by the already splendidly decorated Joseph DeCosimo. Mick Kinney's son won the fiddle contest, whose finals didn't finish until after 10 o'clock, after the bar and barbecue tent had long disappeared. Amber light no longer suffused the Lindsay Street Hall: green emerged as the dominant color in the stained glass composition when no light was passing through it. The candle-flame ceiling lights took up the slack and shone more brightly.
People were growing hungry and restless. But all hunger and thirst was slaked momentarily by the fiery & accurate version of "Hell Broke Loose in Georgia," a tune played at the convention in the 1920s, performed by Mickey Nelligan, to take home the laurels and the $200 prize. Coming in second place was Mick Kinney, Mickey's father, who won last year's top prize. When I asked Mick about his reaction to his son's winning the prize, he said he was glad to "pass the torch to a new generation," made this motion with his hands, and crackled with laughter.
At the conclusion of the Great Southern, one gains the impression of having entered into a temporary and dear society--not unlike a summer camp--created for the moment by the love of ancestral music. One can't help but notice how everyone arrived at this common space in his or her peculiar way. Some learned music in church, many learned it on the radio, many learned from family and friends, but at some point old-time music caught their ear, and they began to follow it. Old-time music has a place in each person's history; and some here will have a place in old-time's history. For surely, if the Great Southern is held 100 years from now, we will be justly considered old-timers ourselves.