Praise for Fiddle:
One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music
“Vivian Wagner’s debut memoir takes us on a journey across the country of fiddling and into its heart. Along the way, the young woman, who was trained in classical violin—how to play by the rules—embarks on ‘an affair with fiddling’ that teaches her a new music, a music of grit, improvisation, and raw energy.”
—Rebecca McClanahan, author of
The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings
“Fiddle is a uniquely compelling journey that left me wishing I was a better writer. Vivian Wagner is that writer. Charming, smart, lyrical and surprising, I recommend it to anyone—savage beast or not—who needs their soul soothed.”
—Suzanne Finnamore, international bestselling author of Split
“Irish, Scottish, bluegrass, old-time, klezmer, western swing, Cajun: such are the stops along Vivian Wagner’s quest to learn about fiddle playing at a time when her life is changing. Elegantly wrought, Fiddle plucks the heartstrings with its story of improvisation, adaptation, and the resilience of the human spirit.”
—Lee Martin, author of From Our House and River of Heaven
”Fiddle is more than a musical coming of age. It’s a story of personal salvation as American as its Appalachian setting, and the notes it hits are deep and pure and hopeful.”
—David Goodwillie, author of American Subversive
fiddle
One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music
Vivian Wagner
CITADEL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
For William and Rose
You must use the body—its curves,
its hollows, the spring of the sound, which
brings back what is absent, what has
been and is now gone, fading.
—Sheila Black, “Violin”
The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
—Edgar Lee Masters, “Fiddler Jones”
Contents
1. Learning to Play
2. Mountain Heir
3. The Fiddle Maker
4. A Brief History of the Fiddle
5. The Violin Shop
6. Body and Voice
7. Cuts, Rolls, and Audis: Learning Irish Fiddle in Dublin (Ohio)
8. Real Men Wear Skirts: Scottish Fiddle at the Highland Games
9. Deep, Strange Roots: Old-Time Fiddle
10. Bluegrass Fiddle Boot Camp
11. Klezmer in Cleveland
12. Swinging Through the Southwest
13. On the Wildcat Trail: Fiddle Camp
14. Survival and Recovery: Cajun Fiddle After Katrina
15. Fiddling Out: The Craigslist Chronicles
16. Jamming
17. Miles to Go
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Chapter 1
Learning to Play
My mom always wanted me to play fiddle. She’d grown up poor, the daughter of a long line of pioneers with Scots-Irish and German roots who finally settled in California’s Central Valley in the 1940s. As she packed tomatoes into crates and milked goats, she listened to transistor radios playing country and bluegrass music, which often as not featured fiddling. After high school she left farm country for Los Angeles, worked her way through college, and earned degrees in math and statistics. On her climb upward, however, she took with her some of the culture ingrained since childhood. Growing tomatoes. Putting up jam. Humming tunes. And liking fiddle music.
“You’re always playing Bach and Beethoven,” she’d say to me when I was in high school. “Why don’t you play some fiddle tunes?”
She pronounced the “ch” and the “th” as if she’d never studied advanced German at UCLA. But somehow, pronouncing the names of German composers wrong was almost a matter of principle for her.
She did this with other words, too. Like “wash.” One time a friend made fun of how I said warsh instead of wash, and immediately I realized where this came from: my mom.
So that evening over dinner, when Mom said something about warshing the clothes, I corrected her.
“It’s wash, Mom,” I said with all the superiority I could muster as a nine-year-old.
Her response surprised me. Instead of thanking me for my brilliance and changing her ways immediately, she looked at me, long and hard, her pale blue eyes like thin ice.
Finally, she said, “That’s how I say it, and that’s how it’s supposed to be: warsh.”
And that was the end of it.
The fact is, though, I didn’t know anything about fiddling. I’d never heard it, and if Mom liked it, well, then, it must have been something pretty okie. That’s what my dad often called my mom, teasingly. Okie. I never knew quite what it meant, but it sounded pretty bad. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to be it.
And anyway, I was a violinist.
Some part of me wanted to please my mom, though, to play something that she might like. So one day at the music store with my dad, I saw some fiddle books: Bluegrass Fiddle Styles, by Stacy Phillips and Kenny Kosek, and The Fiddle Book by Marion Thede. I asked him if he could buy them for me, thinking it might make my mom happy if I tried to play from them. Reluctantly, he agreed. He used his own allowance money, which came from his travel reimbursement checks at work, and paid $15 in cash for the two books.
When we got home, I showed my mom the books.
“So let’s hear some,” she said. “Go ahead and play.”
“I’ll need to practice first,” I said, shy and unsure of myself or fiddle music. I tried to make sense of the strange cross-tunings and notations in these books. I tried to understand how to play “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” “Old Dan Tucker,” and “Tom and Jerry.” But I didn’t have any recordings of fiddle music, didn’t know what it sounded like, and couldn’t make much sense of this music. It all seemed so foreign to me, and I couldn’t compare it to the watered-down classical music I’d been learning in lessons and in the school orchestra. So the books stayed on the shelf in my bedroom, unused and forgotten, and I never did play any of those tunes for my mom.
My love of violin had started when I was seven and first heard Elaine Moreno playing. After school at the Navy ranch house of my babysitter, Mrs. Moreno, I’d sit on the couch and listen to her teenage daughter practice. Elaine would swing her thick, glossy black hair through the air, twirling across the living room floor, smiling, at one with the music.
Whatever magic she possessed, I wanted.
So in fourth