The Weekly Croissant: Dispatch from Clifftop, WV

Touching Home

Every year since I was 14 or so, I’ve gone to a fiddle camp, or two, or three each summer. When I attended my first camp as a teenager, my life was forever changed… corrupted? As I grew up and my career progressed, I started teaching at some of these same camps, as well as camps that I never attended as a student, like the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival in Alaska. I even started my own camp in Chicago, which ran for about ten years.

This intense and familiar subculture has felt like a family reunion for so long that I started to take it for granted and even feel burnt out on the whole thing, turning to songs for some respite.

But, when I returned from India last week, (more on that as soon as I get my film developed, I promise!) I started to feel a new craving. I realized that the summer was nearly over. I had spent most of June on tour, July with Family, and on this trip to India, and would be spending August mostly on studio projects. An entire summer without one single fiddle activity! I started to panic; It didn’t feel right. I have never gone so long without being at a camp or a festival that allowed me to check in with this fundamental part of myself.

10 YEARS AGO …WHO IS SHE? (I think I’m trying to remember…) w/ my friend David Goldenberg:

Perhaps it was also the trip to India, that pushed me so far away from any semblance of the familiar, that made me react this way. A need to feel community, belonging, and a part of something that I understand so well.

All that is to say, I made a last-minute decision to drive the seven hours to Clifftop, WV by myself yesterday, to have two days of non-stop fiddle tunes. Last night I played from about 10 PM-1 AM and felt myself start to relax into a sense of belonging.

Old-time music is meditative and trance-like. You sit in a circle and play the melody over and over, trying with each repeat to come closer to one another in rhythm and feel. Sometimes the circle goes hard and then comes way down. The minute you start thinking of something else, you lose your place, play an extra B part, forget the crooked tag, etc. You have to listen, you have to learn, and your mind slowly quiets.

Here are some of my favorite tunes from the weekend’s jams:

Now, I need to head back into the fray, until next week!

Rachel