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Bill and I just got back from the Stonewall Jackson Jubilee at Jackson's Mill, West Virginia, a Labor Day Weekend event we have come to look forward to all year long. It's like going to a family reunion. We see friends there that we don't see anywhere else, and the music is always just wonderful. The venue is a big old barn with a patchwork curtain for a backdrop. The sound system and sound techs are always good, and the general attitude is congenial. Several people have remarked that it's a pretty amazing deal for the price of the $5 entry fee. We have to agree. The Jubilee is a genuine old-time West Virginia fair, complete with top quality crafts, and a lot of activities that I confess I don't take the time to do because I'm so involved with the music scene at the barn.

The schedule of performers gets made up on the spot, daily. I got the opportunity to do a 20-minute set of unaccompanied ballads on Saturday and Monday afternoons. That doesn't happen very often. I was reminded of the power and beauty of those old songs, and felt the joy of singing them at "full throttle." I don't think there is widespread appreciation for the hard-edged, keening vocal style that best suits those old ballads, so it's fun to get to pull out all the stops every now and then. I sang songs I hadn't even thought of for several years such as "The Single Girl's Lament," and "Early One Morning, One Morning in Spring."

Tracy Schwarz, formerly of the New Lost City Ramblers and now of Tracy&Ginny fame, sang a ballad taken from the tradition of Virginia singer Texas Gladden, who had firm opinions about how the old songs should be sung. In an interview with Alan Lomax, Gladden said "they should be sung with an unlearned or uneducated voice." When Lomax asked why, she answered "because the songs were uneducated, you know. I think to get the best results from the old songs that were misspelled and had the words all twisted up in every shape and form, I think the way they sang them was really the best way that they should be sung. I don't think a person who sings operetta should toy with them."

As Maggie Hammons Parker would say, "well, sir, I often think, and I often wonder" how these old singing styles will survive. I'm not one to say that they won't or that they're even in danger, but I will say that it's not too often that you get to hear the real thing, the way that unaffected men and women once raised their voices to express their pain or sorrow without thinking about who heard them. And when they were thinking about the performance, how that old way of expressing emotion through the twisting of a note on a particular word could say volumes.

I like to put at least one old time ballad on each CD we produce. "Put Your Loving Arms All Around Me" has two on it, "Old Virginia," and "I Loved a Roving Gambler, a "new" ballad I pieced together using cues from fragments and following the emotional prompts. I love it because it's like a movie in just a few verses, taking the listener from the time a young woman meets the man of her dreams, to the discussion about her choices between her and her mother, to the climax and epilogue. There's foreshadowing, conflict, the whole shebang.

Our next Bare Bones gig comes up October 19 in Elkins, WV, where we're sharing the stage with mandolin wizard Johnny Staats and the amazing guitarist Robert Shafer. Stay tuned for details...

Becky