Backcountry Notes

click on the picture for "A Fiddler's Convention In Mountain City, Tennessee [1925]"A tradition throughout the Backcountry - - and these days, beyond - - the "fiddlers' convention" is a gathering to celebrate traditional folk ("old time") music. Fiddlers' conventions go back at least a century, and probably grew out of smaller community gatherings where music was played.

(To listen to streaming samples of old timey fiddle music, go here for samples from the Galax Old Fiddlers' Convention and here for an excellent long-running jukebox feed from Roots of American Fiddle Music.)

Although the six-string guitar predominates in modern "folk" music, guitars were rare in the early days of the Backcountry and the American frontier.  The instruments used in that day were the fiddle, which had come over with settlers from the British Isles, and the banjo, which came over with slaves from Africa. When Alan Lomax scoured the Backcountry for folk music in the 1930s, he found fiddles and banjos as the most commonly-used stringed instruments.

1914 advertisementThe Yeoman English, Scotch, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish settlers who came to America in the 17th and 18th centuries shared quite a few cultural traditions, including the tradition of meeting-places.  The British Isles in medieval times had one of the most thoroughly agrarian societies in recorded history, to the extent that scholars characterized England as having "no towns," with the exception of London.  The population was spread throughout the countryside, where families were grouped into areas known as "hundreds." An "hundred" was a variable area of land - - larger in rocky uplands, smaller in fertile valleys - - which was sufficient to support 100 families.  These "hundreds" were gathered into shires, the equivalent of counties. In every hundred and every shire, there were meeting-places where citizens came together for markets, fairs, and courts.

When the Yeoman English, Scotch, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish settlers reached Appalachia, they had found a place much to their liking, where they could spread out over the landscape and live in the traditions of their ancestors.  Like their ancestors, they established traditions of coming together for the holding of court, for markets, and for fairs.  The traditional music of the Backcountry, called "old-timey," developed from the folk music brought across the pond by the settlers.

The big dog of Backcountry musical gatherings these days is the Old Fiddlers' Convention, held annually in Galax, Virginia.  The 74th Annual Old Fiddlers' Convention is scheduled for August 3-8, 2009.  This is a big event and anyone who wants to go but hasn't yet been should visit the Web site and pay special attention to the survival tips.

There are a number of lesser-known events scattered throughout the Backcountry; this is a listing of some of the 2009 conventions:

- - 42nd Annual Grayson County Old-Time & Bluegrass Fiddlers' Convention, June 26-27, 2009, Elk Creek, Virginia.

- - 7th Annual Tazewell County Old Time & Bluegrass Fiddlers’ Convention, July 10-12, 2009, Tazewell County Fairgrounds, Tazewell, Virginia.

- - 15th Annual Alleghany County Fiddlers Convention, July 17-18, 2009, Higgins Agricultural Fairgrounds, Sparta, North Carolina.

- - Fries Fiddlers' Convention, August 14-15, 2009, Fries, Virginia.

- - Historic Happy Valley Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention, September 4-6, 2009, Lenoir, North Carolina.

- - 43rd Annual Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers' Convention, October 2-3, 2009, Athens State University, Athens, Alabama.

- - Appalachian State Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention, February 19-20, 2010, Appalachian State University, Hickory, North Carolina.

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