SOUTHERN SUMMITS: 21 DUETS FOR FIDDLE AND BANJO

ALAN JABBOUR AND KEN PERLMAN

[Reviewed by Bill Hicks, The Old-Time Herald, vol. 10, no. 1 (Fall 2005), p. 45.]

This body of tunes introduced many of those of my generation to serious fiddling – by which I mean taking seriously the versions of tunes played by specific fiddlers, in their specific styles. It is no accident that these tunes are listed, each and every one, with their source fiddler attached. In most cases that fiddler is Henry Reed, the octogenarian Glen Lyn, Virginia, fiddler “discovered” by Alan Jabbour in 1965 or ‘66. Henry Reed’s reputation was large in the area where he played. Oscar Wright told me of a night when Henry entered a dance where Oscar was playing, borrowed Oscar’s fiddle to play a tune or two, and then finished the rest of the dance as Oscar would no longer get up to play in Henry’s presence. By the 1960s, Mr. Reed had weakened considerably and, in some cases, tunes required significant reconstruction to be understandable as whole tunes. In Alan’s lovely metaphor, Henry Reed and the handful of fiddlers left in his generation in the mid-‘60s were like the last grains of sand in an hourglass. In Alan’s work, however, the glass was somehow turned over, and now, 40 years on, it seems relatively full again.

Alan Jabbour pursued the music for itself, for its pure artistic quality. He revered the tunes, and expected those around him (like Bobbie and Tommy Thompson of the Hollow Rock String Band that he formed with them and Bertram Levy) to understand that they should be handled with love and care. “This is Henry Reed’s ‘Billy in the Low Land.’ And this is Arthur Smith’s ‘Billy in the Low Ground.’” In the early ‘70s Alan was pursuing his professional career as Head of the Folksong Archive of the Library of Congress when he was introduced to another great mountain fiddler, Burl Hammons, and the rest of the Hammons family. With the assistance of Carl Fleischhauer, Dwight Diller, and others, Alan produced the remarkable Hammons Family LP for the Library, documenting one mountain family’s musical traditions. The Hammons family provides the other primary source for these tunes, both Burl and Burl’s uncle Edden, who had been recorded earlier by a West Virginia folklorist and whose recordings were eventually disinterred and released in LP form in the ‘80s.

While Alan would be the first to point the listener to these primary sources, his own fiddling is also a remarkable lens into the music of the fiddlers he has studied. To some degree this is precisely because Alan maintained a significant artistic distance from his sources. As a trained violinist, Alan brought (brings) a high technical proficiency to his playing. His left hand is precise, his noting accurate – but not hidebound by classical convention. He hears and plays the details of a tune, the tripleted embellishment, the variations that is itself repeated each second time through the phrase, the doubled open string. His bowing is equally precise, and equally observant. The old fiddlers Alan studied used single note strokes and short slurred bow patterns to achieve the drive and rhythm of the dance. Although Alan was certainly capable of transforming these tunes into the long slurred passages typical of classical phrasing, he never thought of doing any such thing. An Alan Jabbour tune, then, is a particular sort of thing. It is a tune recognizably from a particular source and played with a particular technical accuracy and discipline. And beyond that I think you should simply listen to the CD.

In Ken Perlman Alan has found a perfect partner for his style of artistic tune statement. Perlman has himself studied the tunes and spent much of his life in the search of source players. Among many projects, Perlman produced some years back the definitive field recordings of the fiddling of Prince Edward Island. His playing is accurate, precise, and it’s clear that Ken listens attentively to both the tune and the fiddler.

Thus: 21 Duets for Fiddle and Banjo. The fiddle and banjo duet has always been of particular note in the Appalachian fiddling tradition. The two instruments can twine the melody together and pass it back and forth, their ranges complementing each other to such an extent that, when a melodic banjo player like Perlman is involved, it will sometimes seem as though there might even be a second fiddle present – the duet on “Green Willis” is particularly striking to my ear in this respect, with each player passing the tune back and forth from the higher octave to the lower. This is not dance fiddling – although Alan and Ken could of course play one hell of a great dance if they wanted to. This is a specific, lovely thing they are doing, this presentation of 21 old tunes. And what it affords us all is the opportunity to hear the tunes with a clarity that is almost impossible when listening directly to the sources, or to contemporary musicians who are using the tunes in their conventional purpose, to drive a dance or a jam session, or as a vehicle for improvisation.

For me, as well, this CD is a kind of trip back to those early days. As good as it was back then, Alan’s playing has matured, grown more nuanced and subtle as the years have passed. I’m delighted, as should we all be, that he has chosen to continue recording and playing, that he’s having lots of fun with these tunes he’s loved for 40 years.