I was looking at my mom’s CD’s, and I found this “Early American Roots” CD.
I popped it in and this totally rockin’ music came out. It sounded kinda like ITM, but a bit more “vanilla”, with a little bit of a baroque flavor (it’s from the revolutionary war time period). The instrumentation was the same. Fiddles, Hammer Dulcimers, some weird guitar related things and… six hole recorders, except they were not susatos, and they were made of wood. (Joke, love my susato).
I said to myself “Self, This music rocks. If they can play it on dirty little six-hole recorders and make it sound like gold, then we need to give it a work out on the tin whistle”
Tell my all of your early American folk whistle secrets.[/i]
I heard the group Cordelia’s Dad (warning: sound file attached to home page) at a college parent’s weekend concert. Fiddler Laura Risk was playing with them at the time.
I bought “Spine” and “Comet”, which are their acoustic, modal, American CDs. (Much of their other stuff is rock.) Some songs were apparently collected from the colonial era, at least that was my impression from Tim Eriksen’s song introductions..
They have a gift for presenting truly bawdy songs in a mournful sort of way (“Knife”). The hit of the evening was “Spencer Rifle.” Draw your own conclusions about the firearms analogy.
I play American folk music, but on the Appalachian dulcimer rather than the whistle. I think I have the album you speak of, will have to get it out and give it another listen. I don’t remember it having whistle on it, although maybe I heard it and thought it was a fife.
I play a lot of AMerican folk as does our family band.
The reason it sounds like ITM is that American folk really is ITM’s child. Most of the folks in Appalacia were imigrants from Scottland Ireland etc..
Bluegrass is ITM’s grandchild having been born of Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys by combining American folk, and American spiritual (African) influences and kicking the whole thing up a notch by re-inventing the mandolin.
There is a great album by James Galway featuring Jay Unger and Molly Mason that has some fabulous American folk tunes, many of which feature flute and whistle prominently.
There is a movie (not appropriate for kids due to some sub-plots) called The Song Catcher about a music historian that goes up into the Apalachians and discovers this great music. Also, if you haven’t seen it already, rent O’ Brother Where Art Thou. In addition to being one of the funniest movies ever it has some great folk tunes on the sound track.
O’ Brother is pretty cool, with good tunes, no doubts to that, but I’m thinking farther back. Civil war to Colonial era folk, I’m already pretty well aquainted with the later folk tradtions in the USA (I do strum the banjo from time to time).
And it seems like, from what I’ve been listening lately, That ITM is more like a cousin to early American folk… I mean like… They both come from an older british isles tradion that split and mutated into it’s later froms. The CD that kicked this whole thing off is playing tunes that pre-date the tin-whistle, and are apparently mostly derived from an English tradtion.
Though I suppose we could both be correct, as Early American music was constantly undergoing re-occering, updated, and totally new infusions from wave after wave of europian imagrants (and african slaves, who, along with their desendance, have probably done more to shape American music that whities like us… I assume your white at least… Haven’t met many folks of African desent who play ITM).
Joel Cohen and the Boston Camerata do lots of early American folk songs and hymns–lots other than this, too. Primarily vocal stuff, but enough interesting things to borrow for the whistle.
There’s a song book, Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, as sung by Jean Ritchie that my have older songs. I ran into it when I started to look for older appalachian mountain music. The songs are very similar to the tunes you find in the above mentioned Song Catcher movie. It was pubished back in 1965 and a second edition in 1997, I have a copy of the latter.
A lot of the older appalachian songs came from older traditions in the british isles.
If you were a banjo strummer (clawhammer style?), you might also be familiar with Old Time music which touches the roots of Bluegrass and Country. If you do a search on “Old Time” fiddle music you should find a lot of sources for this genre.
For older traditions you might check some of the older baroque music period for folk tunes of that era, often arranged for recorder (ooops, I said the a the word, I hope I don’t get devoured by the whistle fanatics).
I think the whole “whistlers hate recorders” thing is just folk lore. I’ve made a number of posts about recorders here and there were many friendly replies, seems like a lot of folks here play recorders (like me)… It’s basically the same thing anyway, just doesn’t sound as cool or play as easily. The biggest difference is that whistle music is usually a lot more rockin’ than recorder music.
[quote=“LeeMarsh”]There’s a song book, Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, as sung by Jean Ritchie that my have older songs.
quote]
Jean had a Fullbright scholarship and travelled to Ireland in the 1960’s. She was researching the “roots” of her family songs. Often in concert she will do her family’s rendition of a tune, and then the version she found while traveling. Sometimes the words are different, sometimes the tune is a little changed, but it’s highly obvious that they are closely related.
Jean is a fantastic person, although she is 83 years young now. She ran US ragged at our festival in May - we went home and collapsed, and she and George went out to eat with some others and didn’t get back to their apartment until 2:00am in the morning!
The bamboo flute is not just a simple flute of India and Asia generally.
It is also rooted in American folk apparently. There was a documentary about the birth of blues or some such thing - I forget the name of it - made by Scorsese (?)and there was a fair bit in it about the so called home made “canes” - simple system cane flutes used by American blacks.
I felt somewhat vindicated by that doco. having spent the better part of the 70’s playing bansuri to the blues music of my guitar centric associates.
I do that as well, accept I am one of the guitar centric people. But I play blues on the PVC Irish flute, however. I doubt that American slaves ever used PVC as a construction material.
(Joke, love my susato).
