Red-Haired Boys

May 4, 2008 at 10:01 pm (fiddle tunes, fiddles, fiddling, listening, music, musicians, traditional music, traditional tunes)
Tags: fiddle, fiddle tunes, fiddling, keeping music alive, red-haired boy, traditional tunes, variations on a theme, videos

One of the “Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks” challenges was to learn to embed videos in our blogs. The truth of the matter is, I had an easier time figuring out the mechanics of that process than I did coming up with a reason for embedding a video in my blog. I finally decided that the best I could do was use this as an opportunity to explore regional variations and stylistic interpretations on fiddle tunes, and I randomly selected the Celtic tune Red-Haired Boy.

As a fiddle student, I have always had the option of reacquainting myself with sheet music, which I learned to read more than 30 years ago, in high school, when I played flute. Unfortunately, I stopped playing my flute by the time I left college, and now when I look at a score, I can easily finger my flute keys for the right note, but not translate that same knowledge to the fingerboard of my fiddle. It’s not impossible to overcome this, but considering the difficulty in reading sheet music now that I’ve reached the Age of Bifocals, it’s no longer the easiest route for learning to play the fiddle.

Instead, as I report to my lessons, the first question my teacher, Hope, asks is “What have you been working on?” This is because I sit in on a fiddle jam every week, and whatever song sticks in my head is the one I am most likely to have struggled with afterwards. Hope has taught me a few songs from scratch — such as Bus Stop, which we never play on Tuesdays — but the vast majority of tunes I work on are those I hear often enough to have them memorized. Hope helps me find the missing notes and refines my bowing techniques, but every so-often, we run into the issue of “that’s not how I learned that song.” Hope is quick to agree that there is no “right” way to play the old songs — it’s the regional variations that keep the songs alive. With that in mind, here are three videos I found of fiddlers playing Red-Haired Boy.

This video features the Sierra Swing Conspiracy at the Auburn Bluegrass Fest II; here we have a couple of young men taking some serious detours away from the standard version:

This video has Red-Haired Boy as the second tune in the medley they perform. The fiddler is Qristina Bachand, and the video is from Victoria, B.C. at the 2006 Saanich Fair:

And, for yet another variation, we have the Urban Ramblers on the Bruin Walk at UCLA:

No two versions alike, and none of them the same as the version Hope taught me or the way we play Red-Haired Boy downtown on Tuesdays. A few years ago, I traveled with several other musicians from Binghamton up to the NYS Fiddlers Hall of Fame in Redfield, NY (near Watertown, if you need a larger spot on the map) where we heard fiddlers from the Syracuse area play wildly different versions of familiar tunes, and the same thing happened when I sat in at a jam in Watkins Glen last summer.

The variations never leave the song unrecognizable: the chord pattern the guitar plays to back up the fiddler remains constant, and the gifted fiddlers are free to take flight like kites while the guitar holds the string that ties them to the structure of the song. Other than that, Red-Haired Boy is a lively tune kept alive the best way possible, not by being frozen in place on a piece of sheet music but by springing to life from fiddles, banjos, and guitars everywhere Celtic music is played.