My favorite folk poster is the one listing the lifelines of eighty or so fiddle and banjo players in the Galax area from the year 1750 to the year 2000. If you allow for some spillover in both directions, the chart illuminates an inarguably deep tradition of music within a single community, and all the trouble people take over something so ephemeral. To me, that poster defines what a musical tradition is in practical terms that are easy to understand. That such a tradition can thrive through thick and thin for several centuries also speaks to the health of that community.

In the several hundred years those fiddlers have been sawing away, industrialism in its many forms has chunked out big chunks from the very idea of community itself. Instead of living in multigenerational units, we are divided up into market niches of only a few years each. We don’t hardly go to the store anymore; we go online to Amazon instead.

Industrialism was the force driving the Gentleman Folklorists of the late 18th and 19th century. They were astute enough to see that the cultural life around them was melting away. As common grazing ground was fenced in, people all over Europe were coerced into moving from rural areas to cities. Traditions like the ones that sustained Galax for all those years became spotty and dissipated under the pressures of urban life.

The folklorist David Brose (1951-2021) wrote about how that process worked as time went on. At first, the gentlemen wrote letters to ballad singers – that’s how Francis James Child assembled the English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The next generation of folklorists, the one that included Cecil Sharpe, collected by visiting and hanging with the singers. The next generation, Alan Lomax’s, more professional about it, schlepped their four-hundred-pound recording machines around in cars seemingly designed for rough roads. In the process that generation instituted the idea of bringing the performers to a central place – what our vernacular calls a folk festival but is really a variety show – first to exhibit performers from traditional communities, and later to exhibit performers who learned from them. Later on, the process was amplified through commercial recordings and next thing you know, those traditions turn into commodities, new technology preserves and distributes them. The publishing industry becomes the dominant commodifier, and what used to be community music gets folded into the music industry and frozen in its tracks. Now we have YouTube, so you don’t even have to buy a ticket anymore. Nothing wrong with YouTube, it’s given us access to the Document catalog, the Library of Congress collections, the Folkways and Smithsonian holdings and so forth. But it has also factored out the very communities of origin, tradition-bearers and all.

Enter Craig ‘Frailin’ Evans. He grew up in such a community in Iowa, where his own mom was a major, if humble force playing the People’s Music in all the right ritual places. Being a bright lad, he went to college and got very good at the advertising business. He got so good at it that he was always off at conferences, and his family life eventually dissolved. That put him in a depressing spot. He turned back to his upbringing, and using the interviewing skills he’d developed, began documenting the players, builders and teachers he found at the more hardline traditional music festivals he went to. This is an ongoing project with him. Old-Time Conversations, the book, is just a snippet of what he’s done in the last twenty years or so. He’s made tons of You tubes both of the players playing, and of his conversation with them.

He’s an excellent interviewer, in that he stays out of his subjects’ way and lets them tell their stories their own way. The result is an easy read about a hard subject: culture change, cultural preservation and resistance to culture change using the very tools those changes have wrought. Nobody here is arguing that we shouldn’t have digital recorders: they may be used to distort the Old Ways, sure; but they can also be used to help stabilize them. Craig is sort of an evangelist for Old Time Music, with a special affection for those who make it a point to play the tunes like the old guys did.

We live in a world where recordings of the Old Guys playing are some of the only stable things left. Most of them have passed, but their recorded ghosts have inspired thousands of players to ‘get it right’ for almost a hundred years now. The traditional communities that formed them are largely gone. We can’t do much about the phenomenon known in some quarters as ‘progress’. But in a thoroughly amazing turn, the hippie fiddlers who go to Clifftop and Galax and Union Grove live modern lives that in some ways are remarkably like the tradition bearers’. All together they form a baseline from which you can measure the distance between then and now, in terms of music. The old tunes are tough and dynamic and can stand rough handling. It’s as much a passing on of the spirit as of the explicit notes. The preservationist ethic is high in this world, regardless of the medium out of which the tunes are presented. You can use this book as an introduction to the deepest and best parts of the American Experience. Both Craig and I encourage you to do so.

To buy the book from Craig (he’ll autograph it for you!)or to look at his many videos, go here

To get it from Amazon, go here