First time last night, I was playing on the streets of Deadwood, and ran into a real session fiddle player from Chicago with his family on his way to a fiddle camp. We played in the streets and had a ball, found out I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, but heck, being the only whistle player here, I did good! His wife was a whistler (read recorder player new to whistles), and I turned her on to Chiff and Fipple! Whee! She didn’t have her whistle with her. As par for the course here in Deadwood, we drafted him to be on the jury at the Trial of Jack McCall, and called him a bum! If a fiddler’s a bum, what does that make a whistler?
[ This Message was edited by: Anna Martinez on 2001-08-18 14:20 ]
Good for you and Deadwood. Serendipity is good when finding like minded people. My story is:
We gather to play on Saturday afternoons at Plunkett’s here in Windsor and have brunch. In the nice weather we are on the patio. One Saturday while we ate and played, an older man in sixties stopped and listened for quite a while. We invited him to sit with us, since he was enjoying himself and seemed to know the music. We were taking a munch break when he asked if he could play a fiddle, we exchanged glances amongst ourselves, but let him.
For the next two hours this man played Cape Breton fiddle music like you never heard. Then he-- John-- which is the only name we have of him, put the fiddle down and sadly said “it stills hurts to play after all these years.” I asked if he meant physically-no he said. And that was that. We have never saw him again.
But I still believe in serendipity! And that playing music is a way to meet the world.
Mark
[ This Message was edited by: MarkB on 2001-08-20 20:44 ]