Mountain Music Miscellany, Vol. 1, Ch. 3: The Mountain Music Championship
Well, first of all, if you’ve never been out to the Stecoah Valley Center you are missing a fascinating demonstration of your North Carolina cultural development dollar at work. Stecoah as a community is tiny – its postal status makes it sort of an outlying adjunct to Robbinsville, and Robbinsville is a town of about 2,000 souls – and yet across from Stecoah’s volunteer fire department is a lovely old schoolhouse with a sizeable auditorium that functions in grand style as an arts center.
All the folks over there are kindly and aglow with pride and excitement when an event is in full swing, and they surely deserve their glow: their Arts Center is pulling off remarkable feats; it attracts impressive acts, and the Mountain Music Championship brought in folks from Asheville and Marshall and even further afield.
So, our first place bluegrass fiddler at Stecoah can’t have been much over twelve years old. There was a separate “junior” fiddle division, mostly little tiny squeakers, but if your kid wanted to compete in the “senior” division they were welcome, and young Alex Tomlinson certainly deserved his first place ribbon amongst the older competitors.
Fiddlers here were not required to play one hoedown and one waltz, as is often a standard requirement at fiddle contests. Most folks can hack their way through a fast hoedown, but bringing some grace and swing and lyric emotion to a waltz, that is frequently above your average hoedown fiddler. Among his tunes, Tomlinson chose to play several waltzes and within the first few notes of his first waltz the youngster had signaled himself to be a contender, with strong tone and a supple, intuitive, fluid approach -really, kind of a shock in a fiddler so young. Bravo, Alex!
Two fellers from out in the Mars Hill/Marshall area rattled in with a carload of instruments: between them, Roger Howell and Adam Masters must have left with upwards of 1200 dollars in prizes. They were an excellent duo, switching off as accompanists for each other as they competed for prize after prize.
Masters won – among other prizes – first place old time fiddle; he played “Midnight on the Water” a lovely old waltz made the lovelier by his playing it on a 5 string fiddle rather than the standard 4 string variety.
Howell is a grand old man who bears among his distinctions playing fiddle with Carroll Best, a marvelous melodic-style banjo player who lived in the Sylva area. Howell won first prize for old-timey banjo, and like Best’s style of playing, Mr Howell’s banjo picking was sort of a missing link between the oldest and the most modern styles; his playing was not strictly the old time clawhammer approach that I associate with mountain pre-bluegrass banjo, but it was decidedly not the three finger rolling approach made universal by the golden age of bluegrass. At times it gave me the impression I was hearing a style somewhere between minstrel-era banjo playing and early “hot” jazz playing.
A side note: I never had the opportunity to hear Mr. Best play, he had died shortly before I moved to Sylva. He can be heard, though, on a brilliant CD called “Say, Old Man, Can You Play The Banjo?).
Another dynamic duo coming to us from the east – the Asheville area -were Barry Benjamin and Gabrielle Macrae, who among them also netted multiple prizes in the fields of old time fiddle, banjo, guitar and band. Benjamin always impresses me; he recluses himself it seems for months and years at a time and then I’ll see him re-emerged and playing flawlessly in a style or on an instrument I had not previously know him to play.
I think he may have been the first appalachian ol’ timey fiddler I’d heard when first I came into these mountains, playing in all his crooked glory for a contra dance. Subsequently, I have known him to be a fabulous old-time clawhammer banjoist, a wonderfully able blues guitarist, and also an accordion player in the bayou cajun vein.
I wish I could be as informative about Ms. Macrae other than to say she’s from Oregon and and played a wonderful tune called Farewell to Tryon which I must now count among my favorites.
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