Dating : Step Back Pretty Girls, Don’t Come A-Nigh Me

Every time I go to an old-time fiddler’s festival, I get chased out. I’m a nice person, I think. I don’t drink too much and raise sand like so many other fiddlers at those things. None of those guys ever get chased out of the festival. I’m pretty considerate; I hardly ever call tunes and I don’t show off. The problem is my daimon. Whenever I start to play my fiddle, he unfolds before me a to-scale representation of old-time music history.

Don’t imagine a timeline or that sort of thing — it’s not like that. It’s not chronological; the first “Sugar in the Gourd” ever played sits directly atop The Holy Modal Rounders’ version. Every moment coincides — the objects on this map are only distinguished by the points at which they don’t overlap. These points represent variations in a tune’s structure, rhythm, and whatever. This map is really a pedagogical tool that the daimon uses to persuade me of the truth of his conception of old-time music. He claims it ought to be a living tradition, a proper “folk tradition”. I’ve tried asking him what constitutes a “folk tradition” anyway, and he always says something about unselfconscious traditions belonging properly to one’s own culture, not adopted from another, with a social context. I never know what he’s talking about; I can always think of exceptions to his definitions. Once, I brought up Wittgensteinean family resemblance, but he wanted nothing to do with it. He said he had his own family, thank you very much.

The obvious question is how I got this daimon. The phrasing of that question is so “I bet you’re wondering how I got here” that I hate to say it out loud. I don’t know how else to introduce it. When I was in junior college, we took all of this MDMA. You know how, when you look at something while you’re on MDMA, the image stays for a long time after you look away? I was listening to Emmett Lundy’s “Ducks on the Millpond” and that same thing happened, but with the music. It wasn’t just “stuck in my head”, but I could actually hear it — faintly, I’ll admit — at all times. After that night, it got progressively worse. The music actually got louder as time went on until it sounded like someone screaming the tune, rather than a fiddle playing it. The melody became more obscure every day until it was just someone talking. He introduced himself as Emmett Lundy. He insisted to me that he wasn’t the departed spirit of Emmett Lundy the man, but that the daimonic Lundy preceded the particular man. The man Lundy was a kind of instantiation of an eternal, archetypal something-or-other. That doesn’t exactly capture it, but I didn’t totally get it when he told me about it. Sorry I can’t explain it better. So he’s just up there, always instructing me re. old-time fiddling. I was an alright fiddler before Lundy showed up, but I think I’ve gotten better since then, mainly because I can’t put the damn thing down. Lundy starts whimpering whenever I do something other than play the fiddle. My house is a mess. I haven’t had sex in six months. I can’t get an erection with this daimon-archetype thing whimpering in my head. Usually I can get away with doing some work, because Lundy understands that I need a little money to keep the fiddle bow haired and to buy plane tickets to fiddler’s conventions.

Anyway, there I am at Galax sitting in a jam circle. Someone in Crocs and a Phish shirt calls “Sally Gooden,” and so I go at it. It’s hardly me, though; that fucking daimon Lundy is doing all the work. He’s really swinging that thing, so much so that no one can follow me. I’m way off. I play the A part, then the B part, then the C part, and then a D part that no one has ever heard save for this PhD folklore student at the University of Georgia. I guess this is the daimon’s idea of authenticity. I always feel weird about it, because I’m from Los Angeles and only picked up the fiddle after watching a few YouTube videos about it. I don’t know exactly what folk music is, but I sure don’t bear a family resemblance to any of the fiddlers in Galax. Everyone stops playing but me. Some lady with, like, eight lip piercings calls for security.

At this point, I’m playing this variation that Protagoras Jackson of the UNC folklore department gave a poorly-attended lecture on in 2011. Lundy, of course, doesn’t know about that. In fact, he came up with this variation some 4,000 years ago and played it on a Babylonian lute. Somehow it made its way to a small mining community near Skull Camp and just stuck around.

The daimon is driving the point home: old-time music will die if we think of it as a preserved musical form, like a Civil War reenactment or something. We ought to approach it the way Eck Robertson did: as a musical tradition that belongs to us, the stylistic confines of which are never absolute. As I’m listening to the daimon, festival security grabs me under my arms and hauls me toward the front gate. A mob has formed behind us, consisting mostly of 15 year old banjo prodigies and people wearing tie-dye. I’m still fiddling by the way. It’s a little awkward to do now because the guards are restricting the range of motion in my shoulders. I’m kind of just vamping now and the melody has been lost. Someone lobs a half-full beer can at my head just before the guards throw me down onto the dirt parking lot. The daimon just loves this stuff, as it makes his point for him: old-time musicians are fascists. I don’t care so much about his point; I just wish I could play music with other people without doing something weird.