Words are tricky little things. They can seem so unimportant and yet sometimes even tiny words can have huge meaning. “Fiddle” for instance is the biggest word I know and yet it only has 6 letters.
The interesting thing about words is that songs are full of them. Seems obvious and yet it isn’t really. People who would never dream of reading a novel for fun will walk around all day singing stories-if there’s a good bass line anyway. You’d be unlikely to find a large, gruff, bald–headed and bearded man writing poetry anywhere other than at a music festival, at which time he will of course call it a song, and no-one will think anything more of it. Words to songs are so important these days that some pop tunes have a dozen or more writers. I guess some of them must be writing the melodies, (or borrowing them anyway) and some are probably being overpaid to decide the chords are I, IV and V. But some of them certainly are Wordsmiths. Even the word for a word expert is a great word-that has to be self-interest at work there surely?
But here’s the thing: Fiddle tunes don’t really “do” the whole word thing the way that those in the rest of Bluegrass (and other obviously less important musical genres) do. Now before you all jump on me, I do know there are some great fiddle tunes out there with words. Sally Goodin’ and Redwing and even Red Haired Boy all have perfectly respectable words, as do many many others. Though frankly, lots of fiddle tunes have perfectly disreputable words too. This isn’t that sort of website, so I won’t go into too much detail, but I can honestly say I’ve learned a few words I didn’t know just by looking up lyrics to fiddle tunes. (And teaching an Australian new words is a bit of an achievement I’ve been told!) Just as an example though, Sally Goodin’s pie might be enough to drive you crazy, but I’m pretty sure the words to Hog Eyed Man explain her attractions a little more realistically. How good can pie really be after all?
And then of course there are fiddle tunes with words that are so disreputable that we never sing them anymore. No matter how you feel about the merits of political correctness, it’s now highly likely you’d get the wrong end of a banjo around your ears if you sang the original lyrics to many old fiddle tunes in public. Although, come to think of it, which end is the right end of a banjo?
But we loved those tunes and we loved most of the lyrics, so in the true spirit of green recycling, lots of those tunes remain with us and have just had the offending terms edited out. Songs have to scan though, so something usually gets added back in place of the old word. If they were modern tunes (or really old Irish ones) they would probably just have “oh baby, la la la” added, but old fiddle players were far too serious for that. They wanted real words in their tunes and so real words were added. I have a friend who calls it the ‘Theory of Inappropriate Nouns’. Whenever a term was so pejorative it needed removing, people just borrowed whatever word was nearest with the right number of syllables and popped it into the verse willy nilly. You end up with some crazy inappropriate words in the middle of tunes that way. I used to think there were just lots of facts about living in the olden days that I didn’t understand, and some tunes do genuinely refer to these issues. After all, who would have thought that Nailing Catfish to Trees or Shoving Pig’s Feet Into Fires were actually sensible pastimes? Fiddle tunes taught me they were. At least, I think they were. I’ve heard some pretty reasonable explanations of what was going on there, but if you apply the ‘Theory of Inappropriate Nouns’ to those tunes you can certainly see that perhaps we’re just playing happy little ditties about some of our darkest past history. I guess that’s one reason fiddle players steer clear of words whenever we can.
Fiddle players probably also partly avoid words because remembering them is pretty hard for us. We have to actually play the melody on that little instrument tucked under our chin and it can get pretty loud with that caterwauling in through the left ear; it makes even remembering the name of the tune pretty tricky at times. (Honestly, sometimes even remembering our own name is tricky, let alone the name of the tune. But perhaps that’s the whiskey that accompanies fiddle playing…?) Anyway, there’s lots more notes in the melody than in the chords and we have to remember them all. In the right order too! So you should probably cut us some slack, we have too much else going on to be expected to know the words to our tunes on top of everything else.
Actually though, I do often sing the words to the tune I’m playing. But I use my own words, and mine tend to go something like “0,1,2,343 triplet, 0, 1, 310 scale down to open A”. I guess they do tell a story, but sadly it’s just not one that most of the audience wants to hear. I can easily teach them to you though, if you’re interested just let me know.
It’s also quite hard to actually open your mouth with a fiddle tucked under your chin, and, in general, singing is best done with an open mouth. Certainly it’s hard for a fiddle player to open their mouth enough to enunciate anything, and forget about intonation (which I often do forget about actually) or good vocal technique if you’re singing while playing fiddle. Bruce Molsky can do it, but he can do anything. And April Verch can play fiddle, and sing and dance all at the same time, but I’m fairly certain she’s a cyborg because nobody could possibly be that cute and co-ordinated, could they? For the rest of us though, singing and fiddling are pretty much separate activities, to be undertaken on different days of the week, and preferably with a nice long nap between them. That’s yet another reason that if you put a bunch of fiddle players in a room together and whisper the magic jam-word you shouldn’t expect to hear much verse:chorus:verse going on.
All in all, as a fiddle player, when I went to my first really truly grown up Bluegrass jam I was quite surprised by how many people wanted to sing songs. What was this, I asked myself? What kind of crazy Bluegrass renegades want to sing all the time? Luckily, I asked myself quite quietly and so nobody heard me express my ignorance. I did feel fairly guilty though, everyone else was singing songs and contributing and all I was doing was chopping away and playing the melody now and then. I didn’t really feel as though I was carrying my musical weight. As a result, my new resolution is to learn as many words as I can, preferably the right ones to the right songs too. So, you’ll easily recognize me if you run into me at a jam in future. I’ll be the one sitting to your right, fiddling away (probably with terrible intonation) muttering to myself and trying to work out what on earth the words everyone just sang were before it’s my turn to join in with a lusty chorus. Actually, you might want to sit a little further away, for your own good you understand. But I look forward to singing with you sometime, because that’s apparently what Bluegrass music is all about.
