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I play mandolin, and have played for many years. I am not great, never will be. Mind you, I am a fair hand at it, but the package of abilities I received at birth did not include prodigy. (It did include skills in other areas, in which I make my living, and for which I have a different kind of passion.)

But I do have a love for the mandolin. I enjoy playing mandolin more than I enjoy listening to any particular genre of music. And I play just about every day for myself, and once or ...

I am presently addicted to old timey music. I still have my love for Irish, Scottish, and Cape Breton traditional music, and French Canadian fiddle tunes, and I still love the New England old time tradition, as well as Klezmer and Eastern European music, and Western Swing, Tango, and... and...

But right now I am addicted to the music of Appalachia. And in particular, Southern Appalachia.

What I like best about old timey music is its worship of the tune. This is not ...

This is a repost of a thread starter that was fairly blog like. The update is that I will be revisiting the location this fall, and I will know ahead of time about the jam and show up again, this time for three weeks running. I sent emails, and seem to be remembered, so this should be fun. So... about a year ago...


So here I am in a strange city, for one week, for work. Of course I brought my mandolin, at least to play in the hotel room in the evening.


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I have always seen this music as a subset of Old Time, what a number of folks would call Northern Old Time, as it has so much New England and French Canadian, and Irish/Scottish influence as Appalacian. If it is its own category of music, well thats great, I would not argue.

It is a body of tunes. I recently checked out a contra-dance web site in an entirely different part of the country from where I live, a place I have never been, and I found their set list was entirely familiar ...