any bluegrass whistle players?

Darwin · Post by **Darwin** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 6:52 pm

Colin wrote:
Jennie wrote: Some of my bluegrass musician friends claim it's hard to play along to Irish traditional music because they can't find the beat. I changed my style to suit them when I play there, using more articulation and less ornamentation.
Jennie
... one thing's for sure - Blugrass player's are entirely unused to playing in 6/8 or any jig time. Considering the Scots-Irish influence on the origins of Bluegrass I always find the total lack of tunes in jig time somewhat perplexing.

The same is true of the Old-Timey music that Bluegrass is partly derived from. I've been playing Old-Timey since the early '60s, and Bluegrass since the early '70s, and I learned my first jig (Swallowtail) on the guitar just a little over 3 years ago.

And it wasn't till I started reading about jigs on Brother Steve's site that I figured out how to flatpick a jig properly. That made it so much easier.

http://www.mustrad.org.uk/reviews/m_wilson.htm mentions:

"As one has come to expect there are no jigs - although 6/8 tunes were played in the Ozarks within living memory and still occur in north Missouri. As in most of the south it seems jigs have either been dropped or converted to 4/4 ."

I wonder if this has anything to do with the predjudice against dancing on the part of some Protestant groups. (And the Scots-Irish immigrants were generally Protestants right from the beginning.) Jean Ritchie mentions how people got around the prohibition against dancing by treating round dances and square dances as games, rather than as dances, per se. It might be harder to do this in the case of jigs. Just a wild guess.

cowtime · Post by **cowtime** » Mon Oct 04, 2004 7:38 pm

jim stone wrote:We sure are welcome in these jams, in my experience,
and the format Missy describes of going around
and improvising is wonderful (although a
bit scary, for me).

Two tunes I've been working on, which
you can get by doing a search online, are
Blackberry Blossom and Cherokee Shuffle,
the former is Irish as well as Bluegrass.

Funny you should mention Blackberrry Blossom.
My brother ,the MUSICIAN extrordinaire , learned old time from the old masters in the truly traditional way. (I learned a bit, but not nearly as much as him) He learned this tune on fiddle from the old folks.
I learned this tune from a whistle book. One day we were playing together and I said I'd learned a tune I really liked called Blackberry Blossom. He said "I know that, learned it from Herb(an old time fiddler)."
Of course his version was different but the nice thing was that they blended together perfectly. We still play this tune on the odd occasion.

jkrazy52 · Post by **jkrazy52** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 12:58 am

There is a group, "Wiley Dew", in my area that plays "folk music with an Irish/Appalachian flavor". The 3 musicians play a wide variety of instruments, including whistle (Oak) and bodhran. I heard them play at a Celtic Festival at a local college over a year ago. They have a unique sound, and write a lot of their own music. What I found to be interesting side notes to the group is that the female vocalist is a descendant of Jenny Wiley and they live in "W" hollow -- famous here as the home of writer Jesse Stuart.

... but, not exactly bluegrass .....

FWIW
~Judy

missy · Post by **missy** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 6:21 am

as already posted, bluegrass is "decended" from old time, but sometimes the lines blur between them (and even back to Irish/Scottish/etc.)

And also already mentioned - Jean Ritchie had a Fullbright (sp?) scholarship to study music in the British Isles, and found the origins of a lot of her family's songs. She put out an LP of these, which was recently transferred to CD, but I don't know the title - I'm sure you can find it by searching. On the CD, she has someone doing the "traditional" version and then she follows with her version.

While timings and phrasings may be different, all of these "genre" of music work well on whistle (or dulcimer or any other type of diatonic instrument).

Missy

vomitbunny · Post by **vomitbunny** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 7:23 am

Is there not some site somewhere anywhere that is like the tune finder for irish music except for bluegrass and old timey music? Anywhere? By anywhere I mean free.
Apparently these people don't believe in either sheet music or ABC.
I'm gonna have to get me a fiddle and interogate it. Put a pillowcase over its head and attach electrodes to it. Yeah. It's ok. It's for its own good. It'll thank me later.

IDAwHOa · Post by **IDAwHOa** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 7:56 am

vomitbunny wrote:I'm gonna have to get me a fiddle and interogate it. Put a pillowcase over its head and attach electrodes to it. Yeah. It's ok. It's for its own good. It'll thank me later.

Location: Where do you think they keep people like me, anyway.

I am certainly glad they let you have a computer in your padded cell!

vomitbunny · Post by **vomitbunny** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:08 am

I'm taking that as you don't have a link to sheet music.

IDAwHOa · Post by **IDAwHOa** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:24 am

Oh, this is what you wanted?

http://www.jaybuckey.com/

http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/enter.htm ... ic-c8g363E (not free, but seems cheap)

http://www.emusic.com/browse/0/b/b/a/0/ ... 411/0.html (claims 50 free downloads)

http://www.freesheetmusic.net/ (might find something here?)

http://www.findfreesheetmusic.com/ (look under the folk heading)

http://www.ibluegrass.com/ (free classified section)

There are a bunch more. I used metacrawler and typed "bluegrass sheet music" for the search term.

missy · Post by **missy** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:28 am

here's a link to old time midi's:
http://hetzler.homestead.com/music_2.html

to get sheet music, however, you need to be a member.

Ceolas also has some tunes that are old time or blue grass, and may have some ABC notation.

Part of the problem is you are going to find a LOT of TAB done for a particular instrument, but you may or may not find actual music notation with these.
Another "problem" is what I play and call "Blue Moon of KY" may be just a little different than someone else from a different area. Because this is a mainly ear transmitted music, you'll have different areas playing songs in slightly different ways, song titles may be different and words may also be different. Some areas may have a "C" part to a song, others don't (Ragtime Annie is one like this).

If you find the title of a particular song you want to learn, let me know and I may be able to help you find notation, or could do up a quick one for you if I know the song myself. Again - it would be the "this is the way I learned the song" notation, and may not be how someone else plays it.

Missy

fearfaoin · Post by **fearfaoin** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:56 am

<a href="http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/Music/ ... >Here's</a> a large ABC file of Colonial fife music.

<a href="http://members.aol.com/kitchiegal/kmmus ... l">This</a> also looks promising.

Oh, and <a href="http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/RRTun ... l">this</a> is really spiffy: you can put in a sequence of notes (using ABC lettering format, without the rhythm),
and it will try to find tunes in which that sequence exists..
I just put in eddgdd (3rd measure of the A part of Kesh Jig), and it found the Kesh Jig (as well as several other things.)
As you add notes, it narrows the field significantly... cool.

LeeMarsh · Post by **LeeMarsh** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 3:20 pm

Instead of looking for blue grass, you might want to search for Fiddle music or tunes. You'll find things like

<a href=http://www.1001tunes.com/>Roots of American Fiddle Music</a>
<a href=http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc/> The Fiddler's Companion</a>

Hope this helps you ...

waitingame · Post by **waitingame** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 4:02 pm

And yet another link
http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/

RonKiley · Post by **RonKiley** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 4:49 pm

Not only are bluegrass tunes played differently in different areas most players don't play the same way two times in a row. This is especially true of banjo players. There are some books around that have the dots for some bluegrass tunes. I don't know who they sell them to though since I don't know any bluegrass player that can read music. (John Duffy was an exception that comes to mind)

Ron

Jack · Post by **Jack** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 5:15 pm

Is Emmylou Harris bluegrass? I think I've heard whistle and flute in her music.

Walden · Post by **Walden** » Tue Oct 05, 2004 5:21 pm

Cranberry wrote:Is Emmylou Harris bluegrass? I think I've heard whistle and flute in her music.

Whistle and flute seem to be making inroads into country & western music, after a long seeming ban on any wind instruments other than harmonica, which was largely perpetuated by the record company people, and radio programmers responsible for rigidly classifying all styles of music... the same kind of folks as the record exec who demanded the Beatles drop the harmonica, and the radio DJ who busted the Florida Boys record, on-air, because it had trumpets.