For Old Time’s Sake


Once, a town’s fiddler was more important than its cable provider is today. When he put his bow to the strings, neighbors set aside differences and passed the cider jug. Young people fell in love in time with his tapping boot.

Few today remember a time when music was glue to bind a community. But during the third full week of June each year, a small Idaho town recalls the old fiddle songs, the old styles of play—and it remembers what music once did for us all.

Weiser, a farming community of just over 5,000, hosts the annual National Old Time Fiddlers’ Contest. It lasts a week and draws more than 10,000 visitors. According to organizers, it’s the nation’s biggest old-time fiddle competition.

An old-time fiddler is someone who plays the danceable folk tunes of this nation’s rural youth, songs such as Sally Goodin and Dusty Miller, in the old style. Ask 20 fiddlers what old style is and get 20 answers, but to the uninitiated it’s simple: it’s music to send you swinging and stomping across a scarred plank floor.

Surprisingly, Weiser’s grand champion last year was not a crusty old-timer in felt hat and baggy overalls as you might imagine, but a teenage boy. Tristan Clarridge trained as a classical violinist. In front of a crowd he wears an uncomfortable grin and a stiff stance that relaxes only slightly when he plays. Tristan performs professionally with his 21-year-old sister, Tashina. In 2003, she took Weiser’s second place trophy. Another final round contestant was a boy named Luke Price, who if he lost the gelled hair and low-riding jeans, could impersonate Harry Potter.

But if these and most of last year’s other 302 contestants aren’t what you picture as “old-time fiddlers,” that’s in keeping with the event, for nothing at Weiser is quite as you’d expect.
For instance, it takes a stretch of imagination to say the contestants perform, since the word implies that audience enjoyment is the point. At Weiser, the audience is very welcome—and quite irrelevant.

That becomes clear the first time a contestant and his two or three accompanists climb onto the small stage in the center of Weiser’s high school gym. A large, capsule-shaped microphone is adjusted over his strings. When he’s happy with its position, he begins. Through his entire three song performance, he never speaks to, never even turns to the audience. His focus is that mike.

Why? Because the judges are in the library clear across the school, listening to the notes the microphone captures, so they can judge the music, not the player.

Another surprise: The music is fun and nearly flawless, as might be expected of high-caliber competition. But to the uninitiated, it can sound like the same song played again and again.

Partly that’s because it is. In 2003, a spectator who attended the whole competition could have listened to Cottonpatch Rag 32 times. I Don’t Love Nobody was performed 39 times.

The repetition may not be exciting for the audience, but for a devotee of this music, what’s being created is a living library. Each song must be memorized: no sheet music is allowed onstage. So despite the repetition of popular favorites, 421 old-time fiddle tunes were committed to memory and performed at Weiser last year.

This is important to advocates, who say sheet music can’t capture the life in these tunes, their fancy licks, their “attitude.”

“Weiser is Christmas in June,” says Tony Ludiker, five-time grand champion. He’s been attending the contest for decades, and says when he dies he wants his ashes scattered on the school football field where contestants camp. It’s hard to tell if he’s kidding.

It’s midweek of the 2003 contest, and both Tony and his 18-year-old daughter have made the top 10, surviving three cuts during the week. On Saturday, they’ll compete against each other, but right now they sit on ice chests before Tony’s tent. Kimber is playing the only song she’s ever written. She named it for her fiddler grandfather because, she explains with teen-age pragmatism, “Every song needs a name.” Even though the contest is about preserving the old, she risked playing her new song in the third round.

A Waltz for Lloyd is pretty, both sad and buoyant, with notes that slide smoothly together. Which means it sounds like the other waltzes played in this contest. And must have to the judges as well because, as Tony gleefully points out, “She didn’t get cut for it.”

What’s happening inside the gym is important to fiddlers even beyond the songs themselves. It’s a discussion of sorts, about what old-time fiddling is, how to preserve it, and how much it can be allowed to evolve before it’s lost. When A Waltz for Lloyd is accepted, Kimber becomes part of that discussion.

But to see music doing what it did when the old songs were young, it’s best to leave the gym. Living library or no, that stage is not where music weaves real magic.

That happens on the football field, crammed with RVs and pop-up trailers. Campground rules say generators must go off at midnight, but nobody ever makes the fiddlers stop.

And they don’t. In groups of two or 10, players find their way into, around, and back out of tunes together. The shared music forges community, one that has been reinforced over the years until Weiser feels like a musical family reunion.

There is a community across the road, too, in a camping area full of musicians who won’t set foot on the contest stage. Some are fiddlers, but the air also sparkles with the sounds of dobro, accordian, spoons, and mandolin. They call the place Stickerville for the stickery weeds that grow in what is, most of the year, a dusty vacant lot.

As at the gym, performing isn’t the point. Here, it’s not even about winning. These players, hundreds of them, came from across the country to jam. And to learn from each other. Some wander from group to group. Others gather under a shade tarp for the afternoon. Here and there stand spectators, many of them non-musicians. These small audiences seldom clap, but they’re not being impolite: They understand it would only cut into playing time.

Not every musician at Weiser wants to jam all week. On Friday, June 20, 2003, Tashina Clarridge plays alone, outside a locked entryway to the school. She wears a red velvet skirt, a battery-powered metronome on a cord around her neck, and a look of pale, masklike calm. She looks like a little girl playing at concert violinist.

“This place is so full of music,” she says. “I get into bed at night with 20 versions of Hotfoot in my head.”

So she’s hiding, practicing the nine pieces she’ll play in Saturday night’s three rounds if she makes the cuts.

Three couples wander up. They have tickets to the contest. They’re looking for the school’s main entrance.

“You’re going to practice? Can we listen?” a woman says.

“As long as you don’t play,” Tashina replies.

“All I play is the radio,” a man says.

Everyone laughs and then Tashina draws her bow across the strings and they stop laughing. The girl closes her eyes, her bow arm swoops downward, and she begins in earnest. Fast notes carom like ping pong balls off walkway, ceiling, and walls. The effect is captivating.

“This, “ she says, stopping to gesture at the walls with her bow, “makes me sound better than I am.” Nobody laughs. They just wait for her to play again, which after a moment she does.

And that’s the best thing Weiser offers non-players: the chance to take beautiful songs, like ripe fruit, straight from the hands of first-rate musicians, to join in some small way the community that music has made here. Just like old times.

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