by Emolyn Liden, Programming Operations Assistant on February 1, 2010
in Music! Dancing!
Last weekend the Keith House Community Room was taken over with shuffle-step-rock-steps, chugs, and good ole’ plain ole’ stomps! Eventually we scooted into Tennessee Walking steps, buck steps, and syncopated moves. My sister, Annie Fain Liden, and I had twelve students and we established first thing on Friday night that we were there to have fun! Our parents Martha Owen and David Liden provided the music which was much better than any recorded music could ever be.
Martha Owen on banjo and David Liden on fiddle
No matter how you spend the majority of your time, I believe it is important for us all to get up and move around at the end of the day. There is nothing like walking with friends, exercising to the max, or (my favorite) dancing! Musicians also know that if they provide a good groove, they will attract dancers. Clogging can be approached in a variety of ways, informally or with precision. In the end, clogging is about making beats with your feet, adding to the music as if you, the dancer, are the percussionist, or letting the style of music dictate what sort of rhythm comes from your feet by dancing freestyle. But, like I said before, no matter the approach it’s all about having fun.
Chloe Davidson and Jessica Kaufman practicing the promenade variation
During the weekend we started each session by stretching and warming-up, then we jumped into an array of steps, and looked at the possibilities of building from basic steps into advanced ones. By Saturday afternoon the class had learned a new dance vocabulary and so — we then let them lose! Together they choreographed a dance by picking their favorite steps and fitting them together with the music. At Show-and-tell on Sunday I proudly introduced the “Folk School Stomp-a-lot-ers” to the crowd. Confidently the dancers took the floor and clogged the house down. There was nothing left to sweep up after our number — we danced it all to smithereens!
Weekend classes instruction is from 7-9 Friday night, 9-12 and 1:30-5 Saturday, and 9-11 on Sunday. The weekend is ended with Show-and-tell and the Closing Ceremony.
You meet the most interesting people here. Over the years, I’ve learned from and enjoyed talking to some of the world’s great characters right here in Brasstown. Shortly after I became the Director of the Folk School, I asked some of my musical and crafts friends to tell me great people we should try to get to teach at the Folk School. A trusted musical advisor, Beth Ross Johnson, said “Get the great ballad singer Norman Kennedy.” My weaving advisor (spouse Nanette) said, “Get the great weaver Norman Kennedy.” These two turned out to be the very same ponytailed Scotsman. So for the last eighteen years or so, he has made visits to Brasstown which are always memorable for us here, jazzing up weavers and spinners, slamming tweed on the table to the beat of the ancient waulking music, where the singing and the weaving come together, as the song propels the cloth sunwise around the table while all the hands of the people lift it up and slam it down and pass it on to the next waulker. In this way, the wool is preshrunk, softened, bonded and unified. The people likewise, except they are not preshrunk.
Born in Aberdeen, he was gifted with a lovely singing voice and a prodigious memory. At an early age he began to learn ballads with hundreds if not thousands of verses, in both Scots and Gaelic. He could even sing in English. He even claims to speak it, but sometimes it is hard to tell. Whatever English he is speaking, it’s way down deep within thick layers of Norse and Pict and Braid Scots and the cosmopolitan sounds of a seaport town. Forty years in Vermont have not influenced his accent because the people there do not speak. Remember what Calvin Coolidge said? Neither do I. He was from Vermont.
Norman can rare back and close his eyes and sing you off to castles, mysterious rides through the wood, long sea voyages, back to the old cattle stealing days, the sailing times, the rhythms of long evenings sitting by the hearth. He can break your heart with songs of lost loves and tragic ends. He can tell you how his sailor father went roond the world seven times wi never a passport, and how if somebody told his mither she was getting auld, she’d say, “I’ll knock ye doon and dance on ye!” At an early age, Norman fell in with the Scottish Traveller singers like Jeannie Robertson and Davie Stewart who handed on to him riches of song. This was in days and places where there were not many audio recorders, but fortunately, Norman was there instead. He could listen one time to some ancient song with about 147 verses, and remember the whole thing. He also became fascinated with spinning and weaving, and he sat and spun and sung with old ladies who were the last of their ilk. He has never forgotten a detail of his long life and it has all been profoundly funny, to hear him tell about it. He was taught by great masters and he has become their legacy to us now.
It never works to stereotype Folk School people. Norman can sing the heck out of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and he loves Hank Williams. He first came to this country in 1965, to represent Scotland at the Newport Folk Festival. Norman had just finished singing on the famous day when Bob Dylan went electric, to the dismay of his folkie fans. With his typical open-mindedness, (and working-class musical roots which included Scottish country and western bars—think Texas oilfields, only tough) Norman liked Bob’s new sound and thought the audience would come around.
It was great to see him again. He’s still way Scottish, but he’s been a great American singer and craftsman for a long time now. A few years ago, he was presented with the National Heritage Fellowship, our nation’s highest honor for keepers of tradition.
by Emolyn Liden, Programming Operations Assistant on January 25, 2010
in Fiber Arts
Martha Owen and Norman Kennedy joined together this past week to teach an advanced spinning class at the John C. Campbell Folk School. Norman learned to spin, knit, and weave from his grandparent’s generation, from people who were working with textiles in the late 1800s, when Victoria was still the Queen.
Martha is the resident fiber artists at the Folk School. When not teaching she is tending to her forty sheep and two collie dogs.
Both expert spinners are also great story-tellers, so there wasn’t a dull moment to be had.
“We started using the distaff and spindle, and progressed to the walking wheel and on to the treadle wheel,” Norman said, “because that’s how it historically was. We used a variety of fibers including wool, cotton, and flax and helped the students improve their techniques so that they got more out of the time and effort that they put in to it.”
First the students learned to card the fiber into rolags. The hand held cards act as a brush to align the fibers to look like smoke. The more delicate the rolag, the more control the student has to spin thin thread-like yarn. Hand cards were invented in the 1500s. Before this, the fibers were combed. “They found combs in the viking ship burials,” said Norman.
The class also dyed wool using onion skins for yellow, cochineal for the colors scarlet and crimson, and copper with ammonia for a mint green. Martha worked with the students on design techniques for knitting, and tricks to layer and mix colors when carding.
“At the end we waulked (luadh in the original Gaelic) a piece of tweed to show the students a form of how finishing a piece was done in the highlands and western islands in Scotland amongst Gaelic speaking people.” Waulking is a process of semi-felting the cloth to make it somewhat water and wind repellent. Norman and Martha will be teaching together again next January. Thank you Melissa Weaver Dunning for the photos!
by Emolyn Liden, Programming Operations Assistant on January 17, 2010
in Music! Dancing!
We were pleased to have Alan Jabbour teaching at the Folk School last week. We had twelve fiddlers eager and ready to go and thanks to Alan’s instruction we worked our way through fifteen tunes. Most tunes were in standard GDAE, but we did venture into DDAD, and GDAD.
Alan taught us by ear and we followed along mimicking phrasing, following bowing patterns, and attempting the embellishments that make the tunes “Alan” (and before him Henry Reed and Quince Dillion.) The tradition lives on.
By Friday I confessed that I’d lost sleep because the tunes were stuck in my head until the wee hours each night, but — my pinky finger was much stronger than on Sunday when we began. Alan made using the pinky finger look easy, showing that the fourth finger is equally as vital as the other three. So we placed our pinky fingers on the string below and droned with an open string, or tried to slide from the ring finger to the pinky to give it a lonesome sound. Sometimes (with twelve fiddlers trying this at once) it sounded like a cacophonous, very unpleasant, screech, like all of our least favorite elementary school teachers were scratching their fingernails on chalkboards. But, as our pinky fingers grew stronger we felt more confident, and the drones began sounding sweet evoking heartache and joy all at the same time. Now, I think we would all agree that playing an open string is a wasted opportunity to drone (ever-so-beautifully) two As or Ds at once.
As we faithfully fiddled along, the tunes eventually took shape. Then Alan took them up a notch and we tried to hold on to the quicker tempo. “Keep playing even if notes and bowings are discarded on the floor.” he said.
He also put the tunes into context by telling stories, bits of history, origins, and memories. No tune went without a reference point. We first learned ”Henry Reed’s Breakdown” which was a tune with no name for many years. The next day “Cabin Creek” led to a discussion about giving directions by rivers and valleys as opposed to how we do it now with streets and signs. Later, we heard about Grover Jones’ children, fifteen or so boys and one girl, as we learned “Grover Jone’s Waltz.” Henry Reed’s version of “Shortnin’ Bread” which Alan taught us held it’s own against the diddy that can sound like a kid’s summer camp song (in my opinion.) The origin of “Bonaparte’s Retreat” revealed the history buffs in the class.
At one point, while Alan air-bowed and sang “doooown, up, down, up, down, up” to indicate patterns for different phrases (a hidden talent to be sure), his fiddle suddenly went POP! We all jumped. Alan lifted his fiddle up and tilted it from side to side. We could hear something lose sliding around inside. “Oh no! It’s your sound post!”
Not exactly…but it was something curious. Alan had rattlesnake rattlers inside his fiddle.
“Why?”
“I’ve asked fiddlers about it,” Alan responded. “They give different reasons like, ‘It helps the sound,’…I doubt it. ‘It gathers the dust inside the fiddle.’ These are kind of pseudoscientific explanations. I’ve heard, ‘It keeps mice away.’ That’s a pretty good idea! They hear that rattle snake rattling and stay away from the fiddle! I think it’s finally kind of a magical thing. But you know most magic isn’t to make things happen, it’s to keep bad things from happening. If it’s magic, I think it’s of that sort, to ward off something or another - Lord knows what. I probably don’t believe in it,” he laughed, “but what the heck, you can’t be too careful so I put one in there. Then somebody put another one in, so now I’ve got two, unless one just exploded…”
See how much we were learning in addition to fiddle tunes? Thank you Alan.
We got snow! On Monday the sun was shining bright in a clear blue sky, but by Friday the weather reports were in, and sure enough the flakes began to fall. It had been below-freezing for a couple of days, with night temperatures dipping down to nine degrees, so the snow stuck.
As the sun began to set, I took a walk around campus and saw the beauty brought out by the wintery landscape. The trees, the round hay bales in the field, the icicles in the goldfish pond, the red iron railing, the rocking chairs on the porch were all outlined in white. Some one (probably the Snow Queen) had left snow angels in the parking lot.
Thank you Tammy Godfrey for the nice photos!
RSS