It is time for me to address the proverbial “elephant at the fiddler’s convention” and attempt to define Old-Time music. Distilling a topic as vast, complicated, vague, and esoteric as Old-Time music into a definition that is suitable for this page has been nothing short of a Herculean effort… What follows is my best attempt at doing so. It should not be considered complete or authoritative by any means, but I feel that it is a solid high-level definition that can be supplemented by further research if so desired.
So, what is Old-Time Music?
Old-Time music is the music made by Americans, predominantly in the rural south, before radio and records in the pre-media age. It comes from a time when if you wanted music, you had to make it yourself, or hope you lived with/near someone who did. It is the result of mixing English/Irish ballads and fiddle tunes, with the banjo and blues that originated with the slaves brought from Africa. It is music that had a function and was in the foreground of life. Ballads and work songs were sung in the fields to pass the time, religious songs were sung in church, and fiddle/banjo tunes were the background for dances, parties, and other social gatherings. It was sometimes used to spread the news about current events. Much of the Old-Time repertoire around today has been around for at least a century. It is passed on from person to person by ear and by choice. If people like something, they keep it around, and if they don’t, it fades into obscurity… Because it is mostly transmitted by ear from one person to another, the music will naturally change over time. This is why many old songs and tunes have a lot of different versions that can vary substantially from one to the next. This is known as the folk process. My friend Aubrey Atwater is fond of saying that there are at least three stories behind every song. 1. The story of the text of the song itself 2. The story of how you/someone learned the song 3. The story of the people the song came from
A brief word on the development of instrumental traditions…
Most of the old ballads were sung without any accompaniment. Instruments began to work their way into the tradition starting with the fiddle, which came to America with the colonists in the 1600s. By the latter part of the 1700s, European manufacturers had made the fiddle cheap and readily available. The banjo came over with slaves at the same time that the fiddle came over with the colonists. However, the banjo remained an African tradition until white performers started to take it up nearly 200 years later in the 1840s and used it in blackface minstrel shows. The earliest banjos were made out of gourds and had no frets, and were usually strung with gut strings. The gourd banjos were replaced by banjos with a wooden rim around the time of the minstrel shows. By the latter part of the 1800s, the banjo was being mass manufactured by companies such as S.S. Stewart. The guitar began to work its way into the mountains around this time. When, like the fiddle and banjo before it, manufacturers figured out how to make it cheap and readily available.
Old-Time Vs. Bluegrass
Old-Time music is pre-Bluegrass music. It is what musicians like Bill Monroe, who is considered to be the father of Bluegrass, grew up with. Starting in the 1940s, Monroe and members of his group “The Blue Grass Boys” morphed Old-Time into jazzier performance-oriented music suitable for a touring band. This music took it’s name from Monroe’s group, hence Bluegrass was born. In contrast, Old-Time is the more down-to-earth homemade antecedent that doesn’t necessarily require a full band. The division between Old-Time and Bluegrass music isn’t black and white, it’s grey at best. Ultimately, they are quite similar in a lot of ways thanks to their shared origin. Two of my favorite musicians, my friend Alice Gerrard, and the late Mike Seeger played both- often within the same performance.
Old-Time as it stands today…
Old-Time music will never exist in the way that it once did. It is a tradition that is ironically marked by slow and gradual change. There is no longer a need to be musically self-sufficient as there once was. Old-Time has gone from being ubiquitous to being a tradition that is deliberately kept alive by a much smaller group. Many of them, like myself, were not born into the tradition but were drawn to it in one way or another. Some of them are more conservative and prefer to play the music as it was. Others are more adventurous and prefer to warp things around. I’m not a fan of the latter camp personally, and that will probably manifest on this website in one way or another. However, it is important to remember that we now consider traditional was once new and strange. Ultimately, Old-Time music will remain small in the face of modern mass media and popular genres. However, they will not snuff out the flame completely. It has been around for centuries and won’t be going anywhere. You just have to know where to look for it. Thankfully, the internet has made finding resources on Old-Time music easier than ever before.
I highly recommend watching this interview of Mike Seeger on the subject as a companion to what I’ve written here…