Boyd1 - Posted - 10/03/2009:  11:57:35

---

AlexSmithCFG's cool recent post "Maybelle Carter/Clawhammer style" got me thinking about another thing that's been bugging me about the Carter Family for a while. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that in many songs they add a beat, and more interesting to me, sometimes they neglect a beat. They seem to break the time measure and hurrying back into the verse. Does anyone know what I mean by this? I've heard it in other places in Old Time as well. The best example I can think of is the song "Glory to the Lamb".

Thank you,

Boyd

***************************
Anything you can imagine is real. - Pablo Picasso

AndBanjoWasHisNameO - Posted - 10/03/2009:  12:20:14

---

Hey, I just happen to have a copy of The Carter Family Collection sitting right here. And you're right...they do add extra beats. In fact, they dedicate two paragraphs to the subject!

They seem to have done everything their own way, including not only adding extra beats, but changing tempo within a song,"de-tuning" and "cross-fingering" different keys as well. The sum of all those parts is really made them stand out, imho.

~Michael

"Well, it's a joke son! Don't you get it?"

banjered - Posted - 10/03/2009:  12:57:38

---

About 10 years back I auditioned with a couple of formally trained musicians for a folk/OT/Irish group. My timing drov'em nuts - extra beats, dropped beats, whamming down hard on certain beats where I thought the tune/song needed an emphasis. So they axed me before we even got started. I thought a lot about MY "timing issues" and so I went back to my "sources" - Joan Baez, Doc Watson, the Carter family etc. and damned if they wern't all over the timing mat too, particulary adding or dropping beats from verse to verse as the verses had more or fewer words. Many times, even the written versions of specific songs had radically different timing as well as notes. Go look at "The Water Is Wide" for example. However, it seems some formally trained musicians are of the opinion that you gotta stick by the written page or "it ain't right."

Cetainly tunes are a lot tighter than songs as regards timing but even then there are always "versions." It has taken me quite a while to understand that the "correct" version of a tune does not exist...there are only "versions," and one is not any more "correct" or "wrong" than another. Some tunes even have a varying number of measures. That said, the timing that is most "correct" at a jam sessions is what fits best in the moment. I still have a ways to go (and probably always will) being flexible enough to fit my timing/version to whatever is happening. For some strange reasons I don't seem to have any timing issues when I am playing the tunes/songs by myself....

And now you know why they call them "JAM" sessions. TC

Boyd1 - Posted - 10/03/2009:  14:49:17

---

Right on tom clunie!

I think those Carter Family tunes with extra or less beats thrown in stick out more. They are different and therefore interesting. If I'm not wrong, even Wildwood flower has an extra beat. And Will the Circle be Unbroken seems to be missing one. Please tell me if I'm wrong.

Hey, and AndBanjoWasHisNameO, if you got a minute, could you say- more or less- what those two paragraphs say?

***************************
Anything you can imagine is real. - Pablo Picasso

majikgator - Posted - 10/03/2009:  15:26:36

---

when i get the banjo third reich going that kind of stuff will end, no i guess it isn't jazz but as long as everybody in the group is playing the same number of measures and in time it's music to me. it helps if everybody in the group listens, i know some great players who just want to go straight ahead like a steam rollerand play what they are going to play and expect you to come along for the ride as if there way is THE right way, i would rather play with a lesser player who listens.

jk

Stutts - Posted - 10/03/2009:  15:33:18

---

Playing around with timing is what music is all about. It's why a drum machine with perfect timing sucks. It's not music. Interpretation is everything and it's never exactly on the beat. If it is, it sucks!

banjo_brad - Posted - 10/03/2009:  18:13:15

---

In my mind, I think of the Carter family as mainly a vocal (song) oriented group. Songs are often varied to fit the breathing patterns of the vocalist(s) - added beats/measures, deleted measures/beats to make the words fit into the melody, etc.

I know that I play the same tune/song differently if I am singing (?) it than when I play it as a tune.

Brad
------------------
www.PricklyPearMusic.net
http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/5/ My ezFolk page
http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/3371/ Tucson Old Time Music Circle page on ezFolk
http://www.totmc.org Tucson Old Time Music Circle Homepage

rendesvous1840 - Posted - 10/03/2009:  21:24:03

---

There are a lot of Old Time songs known as "Crooked". Most often, there's a lost or added beat somewhere in the song. For more info, see here:
http://nwfolk.com/songlists/crooked.html
In the case of tunes that may not have been passed on through written notation, crooked versions of "satraight" tunes may have just evolved from players who didn't have anything more than their own memory of how the tune sounded to work from.
Some tunes also exist in crooked and straight versions. They may be regional diferences, or a third part was dropped to make the tund suit dances. Or to eliminate a key change. The A &B parts of Ragtime Annie are in the key of D, the C part is in A. I don't have a clue which version is older.
The few classically trained musicians I have spoken to are somewhat baffled that folk musicians can play without written music, and not make a mess of each song. But consider the context they learn in: An orchestra, perhaps with 25 to a couple hundred musicians, all playing the same piece. If the violins start improvising, they may be playing something the viola's are suposed to play. In a large group, improvising has to be severly limited or eliminated. Even in small folk groups, we don't want to solo over each others solos.
Paul

"A master banjo player isn't the one who can play the most notes. It's the one who can touch the most hearts." Patrick Costello
http://www.banjohangout.org/forum/t...IC_ID=128303 IBARD topic
http://ibard-rendesvous1840.blogspot.com/

stringbeaner - Posted - 10/04/2009:  05:27:11

---

Back in my early guitar pickin' days, I was trying to learn 'Buckeye Jim' from a Burl Ives recording. His vocal was on the beat alright but his guitar accomp. seemed to be missing a beat. I never did figger exactly what he was doing, I just played it my way and it worked jes' fine although I liked what he was doing better.

Stringbeaner

chuckb - Posted - 10/04/2009:  06:50:32

---

The Carters, like many old timers, were not formally trained. They often change time during a song. This was true of Jimmy Rodgers, and many trained musicians didn't like to play with himm becsue of that. However, since Jimmy was mainly a soloist, being arbitrary didn't concern him. John Lee Hooker was the same.

RatLer - Posted - 10/06/2009:  15:26:12

---

Grandpa Jones was always good about speeding up or slowing down on his songs.

RatLer

BRUNO25 - Posted - 10/07/2009:  02:45:42

---

I've noticed this from many of my favorites; Doc Watson, Clarence Ashley, Bob Dillon. As was said earlier, mostly in songs, not tunes, but some tunes too.

Some people have a real knack for feeling that 4, 8 or 16 beat pulse. I find I have a real knack for feelin' "crooked."

oldwoodchuckb - Posted - 10/07/2009:  21:53:01

---

The Carter Family took the ballad tradition or the "sit down and listen" folk tradition and made it commercially viable. Like MOST non-dance music since there is no need to be at a given spot at a given time, you are free to add the needed beats, subtract unneeded beat, or even move them around a bit. This is how most people sing songs - solo. If you rehearse with others you can do similar things within the group.

In a group however, there is far less freedom for varying the tempo, melody or harmony - at least there is less freedom during a performance. Take the time to rehearse a piece and you can do all sorts of things with it - so long as the group can hold it together.

Now at an old time jam there is little wiggle room on tempo or rhythm. Most of the music is dance music and the group has not rehearsed - in fact the group can't rehearse for a jam - by definition. At our local jams members of various stage or dance groups sometimes show up and we all do our best to follow their arrangements for a couple tunes during the evening. Other times our most alpha fiddler will lead the group in a sing-along waltz tempo song, "Goodnight Irene", "More Pretty Girls" etc, at the end of a jam. But the purpose of an old time jam is to play a batch of tunes in dance style, so there isn't time for much of anything else.

At another relatively regular jam there is a core group of us, who have been playing together for nearly 30 years. There are also others who have been around for a similar length of time have played with us before and who might show up on any given occasion. With a little bit of coaching we can get most other musicians playing along with little trouble. Here we supplement the old time music with jug band tunes, blues, folk songs, and various bits and bobs. It works because the core knows the material, or at least knows enough similar material to get it going and keep it from falling apart - most of the time. Since there is no audience or a very casual audience it usually doesn't matter if there are a few crashes. Everyone is having a good time and a bit of crash and burn only adds to the enjoyment.

In either case I don't think your 15 to 100 buck a ticket audience would show up - at least not a second time. There has to be more of a group to audience vibe going. The group has to have some "patter" and an emergency back-up in case of equipment breakdown thing prepared. While the group is doing that, is also a good time to decide which verses seem to come too close together and add a beat or two, or if the instrumental between verses is too long and how to shorten it, when to do a medley, who should sing high harmony and who should not sing at all, and what instrumentation to use and all sorts of other little details that are the difference between a jam group and a stage band.

Jam groups are good practice for country or contra dance musicians, but if your goal is a stage band (or solo act - whatever) you gotta do a whole raft of rehearsing before you go public. Yes Charlie Parker and Coltrane made it up as they went along --- but you aren't them.


http://www.rocketsciencebanjo.com
Rocket Science Banjo - Advanced Clawhammer Techniques for beginners and long time players alike. Plus videos and 25-40 EZ Clawhammer Tunes.
& check out "How To Mold A Mighty Pinky" at:
http://www.pricklypearmusic.net
banjo brad's great banjo site

---

Edited by - oldwoodchuckb on 10/07/2009 22:00:00

clawhammermike - Posted - 10/07/2009:  23:31:35

---

quote:

---

Playing around with timing is what music is all about. It's why a drum machine with perfect timing sucks. It's not music. Interpretation is everything and it's never exactly on the beat. If it is, it sucks

---

speak for yourself. my drum machine doesn't suck. and I can program it to do completely random things and stutter just like most of us when we play

Pete Peterson - Posted - 10/09/2009:  06:32:11

---

The Carters rehearsed everything so carefully that by the time they came into the studio, it was so smooth that the extra (or missing) beats were not noticeable, and until you count it out you don't realize what's going on. Example: Sing "Dixie Darling" to yourself-- either the Original Carter Family version or the Highwoods cover. Can you tell where the extra beats are added? I can't either, but it seems perfectly natural. Like Henry Reed's "Texas"

Pete Peterson

Jami108 - Posted - 10/09/2009:  16:54:42

---

When I first started listening to OT music, the difference in timing was really striking to me. It seems, to me, to be one of the distinctive features of pre-war OT music. To my ear, as music became more commercialized, the wonderful, odd, sticky-out parts got lopped off and everything was made foursquare.

The example of this difference that immediately came to mind was from Disc 1 of "Goodbye Babylon" where there are two versions of "I'll Be Satisfied," one by J.E. Mainer's Mountaineers and the other by Bryant's Jubilee Quartet. While the quartet version is fluid and expressive with tempo, the actual count is completely foursquare. The J.E. Mainer's Mountaineers version however, has beats left out of and added to various measures. I've tried multiple times to figure out where exactly they're doing it but haven't been able to "count" the song for the life of me.

BUT, whatever they are doing, it is completely consistent, i.e., it's the same every time through. And that's true both when the fiddle plays the tune through and when the vocal trio sings it. Same as the Carter Family. It's practiced, regular irregularity.

I've always felt like these early recordings demonstrate how the pre-war musician's ears were different. They weren't necessarily expecting things to be foursquare.



Jami



"When you want genuine music—music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whiskey…ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose—when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!" - Mark Twain

oldwoodchuckb - Posted - 10/09/2009:  17:49:12

---

Remember foursquare is pretty much a development from popular music that moved into country music somewhere between the Carter Family and Hank Williams. I think it has to do with that Honky-Tonk slow grindy dance. You can't be bothered with keeping the rhythm when you are drunk and your hands are busy.

Actually I think Western Swing had the most to do with it. Country and Western were once two distinct music genres, but by the end of the Western Swing era they had become one and the same. Hank Williams sang Country songs wearing a western hat (and outfit). The two genres melded together around this amazing talent. Williams was the first postwar "Elvis.

About this same time the Family Trio and Quartet acts were fading, replaced by the more urban Honky-Tonk band of equal talents style - which started pretty foursquare and has gotten more foursquare as time passes. In fact you could say that white-urban music is out to achieve a good solid march. Hup 2, 3, 4, Hup, 2, 3, 4.

I can remember when "folk" music became "Pop Folk" in the 1950s and early 60s. All the Weavers clonebands sang perfectly 4square arrangements. They even added a line to songs like Pretty Polly because they couldn't "feel" the difference between a 12 bar blues couplet and a 16 bar ballad stanza. They thought Polly was supposed to be Sam Hall and that earlier singers had "lost" the third repeat of the couplet line. The whole and only understanding of blues at that time was the highly 4square urban "Rhythm and Blues" (aka Chicago) style blues that were the basis of Rock and Roll. If you collect early blues records you realize that 12 bar was only a portion of the "regular" blues rhythms - there were styles where the bars sometimes extended or a few of them vanished - It was obviously a solo form. Groups had to be more regular, but they could add or subtract anything they could rehearse. I have done a lot of Jug Band blues over the years - I'm a group player but I don't want to spend all my time on the 12 bar We jam on 8 bar, 13 bar, 16 and other repeating blues forms including the 13.5 bar version of "Viola Lee's Blues".

Getting back to regular-irregular in Old Time. I'm glad to see more interest in the crooked tunes but I know that many of them will not allow any dancing with other than a rehearsed form. Many of the Country Dances that have come down to Contradance call for specific tunes that go with the dance figures. The 8n8 we think of as coutradance is more the product of the contra-revival of the 1970s when Disco Stalked the Cruel City Streets, and back-to-the-landers wanted something to do in the evenings - something without light shows, since the electricity may not be the most reliable. They wanted dances they could learn fast and they got them. A few more intricacies than a rave but still not too much work.

At some time in the 1980s Frank Zappa said "We are living in the late Disco Era". Were he still alive he might say: "Perhaps the Disco Era has become permanent".


http://www.rocketsciencebanjo.com
Rocket Science Banjo - Advanced Clawhammer Techniques for beginners and long time players alike. Plus videos and 25-40 EZ Clawhammer Tunes.
& check out "How To Mold A Mighty Pinky" at:
http://www.pricklypearmusic.net
banjo brad's great banjo site

matt m - Posted - 10/11/2009:  08:10:33

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by stringbeaner

Back in my early guitar pickin' days, I was trying to learn 'Buckeye Jim' from a Burl Ives recording. His vocal was on the beat alright but his guitar accomp. seemed to be missing a beat. I never did figger exactly what he was doing, I just played it my way and it worked jes' fine although I liked what he was doing better.

Stringbeaner

---

That's interesting and quite gratifying because I play 'Buckeye Jim' on the banjo and I often cut certain measures shorter depending on how I feel. The line at the end of the chorus - the final 'Buckeye Jim' after the second '...you can't go' I'll often give one beat too few, as it were. I also often enter the chorus one beat early too.

I think it's cos the song has slightly off rhythmic emphases to begin with - even if you played it in a straight 4 beats to every bar throughout, the sung chorus still has a certain abrupt syncopation to it.

myspace.com/matthewradmoremilton

matt m - Posted - 10/11/2009:  08:10:43

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by stringbeaner

Back in my early guitar pickin' days, I was trying to learn 'Buckeye Jim' from a Burl Ives recording. His vocal was on the beat alright but his guitar accomp. seemed to be missing a beat. I never did figger exactly what he was doing, I just played it my way and it worked jes' fine although I liked what he was doing better.

Stringbeaner

---

That's interesting and quite gratifying because I play 'Buckeye Jim' on the banjo and I often cut certain measures shorter depending on how I feel. The line at the end of the chorus - the final 'Buckeye Jim' after the second '...you can't go' I'll often give one beat too few, as it were. I also often enter the chorus one beat early too.

I think it's cos the song has slightly off rhythmic emphases to begin with - even if you played it in a straight 4 beats to every bar throughout, the sung chorus still has a certain abrupt syncopation to it.

myspace.com/matthewradmoremilton

whyteman - Posted - 10/12/2009:  08:51:17

---

Is it a transition from the agrarian to the industrial world?

Is bluegrass old time moved from the rural setting to the hum of the factory job in town and possibly industrial agriculture with it's straight rows of monoculture? Was swing the first Muzak for shopping and socializing?

Finally, those #%&@ contradancers have way too much influence over OT music IMHO.

Don.

Haul off your overcoat and roll up your sleeve.