For as long as I can remember, this old cassette tape has been around. In a cedar chest, then in the storage compartment of the family hi-fi, back to the cedar chest. I don't remember the first time I tried to listen to it. I just remember how horrible it sounded. It was scratchy, warbly, and the music it contained was unlike anything I'd ever heard.
Jump forward to my 12th birthday. I'd just bought an acoustic guitar at Shivelbine's Music and Sound in Cape Girardeau and was practicing like crazy trying to play Buddy Holly tunes from another cassette I'd found at our house. My Aunt invited me to a Bluegrass festival. I had no idea what that was, but I was up for the camping trip side of it. From the second I got there, it sounded and felt familiar. It was the music I'd heard on the cassette. That was 1990 and from that moment I've been completely infatuated with old-time and bluegrass music. I've had stints where I tried to escape it. A few years when I tried to give up music...4+ years in a pretty raucous rock and roll band. For better or worse, I can't.
A few months ago I was visiting my parents, snooping through the old records in the Victrola and Hi-Fi and found THE cassette. I brought it home and dubbed it into a digital editing software and proceeded to chop it up into tracks and clean up the audio as best as my software will allow.
This old cassette contains the sonic remains from a night in 1967 when my grandfather, who hadn't played his fiddle in years, joined his sister-in-law and brother-in-law for a jam. What makes it special to me is that I never met my grandfather. He passed shortly after this recording.
But here he is. Sawing on an old Stradivarius-copy fiddle (bought off a man on the railroad in Bollinger County, MO)...and doing it pretty damn well.
I never got a chance to jam with my grandfather...but in a round-about way I did get to make some music with him after all.
1 comments:
fantastic!
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