Fiddlin’ Around

Lady Marilyn and I watched Wyatt Flores’ set from Stagecoach on a livestream on Sunday night. We saw Wyatt at the FairWell Festival last summer, and opening for Turnpike Troubadours in Lake Tahoe. The fiddle player in his band, Kenzie Miracle, is a major contributor to the sound, and a significant presence on the stage. Reminds me just a bit of Scarlet Rivera with Bob Dylan’s 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue (my favorite Dylan era by far).

She’s a classically trained violinist who discovered that her true calling was not the violin, but the fiddle. She told Plunge Audio:

I went to college to study classical violin, but standing in my first day of Bluegrass Ensemble class, I knew I was supposed to be fiddlin’!

Funny how that equation only ever goes in one direction…

Anyways, it got me to ponderating on the fiddle. If there is a Frontier Partisan instrument, that’s the one. As FiddleHed notes:

For years, the fiddle was virtually the only instrument found on the frontier. Records show that among the first settlers in Jamestown in 1607 was a fiddler by the name of John Utie, a planter by trade. The first recorded fiddle contest was held in 1736 as part of a St. Andrew’s Day celebration in Williamsburg… Virginia with the grand prize being an Italian-made Cremona fiddle. The oldest American made fiddle still with us today was made in 1759 by John Antes. And, in the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition it is recorded there were two fiddlers, and they contributed much to maintaining the morale of the men and establishing good relations with the Indians.

There’s a feller on YouTube who serves up juicy slices of Americana — a bit of history and a bit of music — around the music that migrated across the Atlantic and built the spine of country music in America.

My favorite fiddler of ’em all is the Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser, who we’ve hosted a couple of times at the Sisters Folk Festival. His First Light/Dawn Rant never fails to get my blood pumping.

Fraser is the fiddle player — uncredited — on what has to be the single most-recognizable piece of Frontier Partisan music:

Then there’s Kyle Nix of Turnpike Troubadours.

The break on The Bird Hunters is a barn burner — and gets me every time:

Haven’t watched A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — but I’ve been told that I would like the soundtrack, so I fired it up. What do I find? Some very nice fiddle work. Now, that’s wildly anachronistic for a medieval setting. The violin as we know it was birthed (like true battlefield-worthy firearms) in the north of Italy in the early 16th Century. The tune below sounds, well, 18th/19th Century. There’s a little Ashokan Farewell vibe to it (Jay Ungar’s beautiful 20th Century composition that added so much poignancy to Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary — because it evoked the period so well).

This kinda thing shouldn’t bug me, but it does… a little. Maybe just because I’m salty that the medieval-themed Game of Thrones got such big cultural play when the 18th Century-set Black Sails is so much better. There was even a throne involved, though it was referred to simply as “That fucking chair.” Petty, I know, but still.

I guess I’m just letting my biases and predilections run away with me. I want more 18th/19th century frontier content, dammit, whether historical or fantastical.

Fewer dragons, more Wendigos, that’s what I say. And a lot of fiddle in the soundtrack.