December 9, 2004
-
The Devil Came Up
to CambridgeFrom a Log24 entry of Friday, December 3, 2004:
“Anything
but the void. And so we keep hoping to luck into a winning combination,
to tap into a subtle harmony, trying like lock pickers to negotiate a
compromise with the ‘mystery tramp,’ as Bob Dylan put it….”
– Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
New York Times, Oct. 26, 2004From this morning’s New York Times:
BLOUNTVILLE,
Tenn., Dec. 8 (AP) – Ralph Blizard, a
renowned fiddler who began his
career playing on the radio, died here on Friday [Dec. 3, 2004],
according to a
funeral home in Kingsport. He was 85.Mr. Blizard started playing at age 7. He began his career on
the radio inTennessee’s
tri-cities area with his band, the Southern Ramblers. In the 1950′s he
stopped performing, taking a 30-year break to raise a family.In 2002, Mr. Blizard was inducted into the American Fiddlers Hall of
Fame…. [He] was a
founder of the Traditional Appalachian Music Heritage Association.In memory of Mr. Blizard:
From Cold
Mountain, by Charles Frazier, 367-368:They consulted and twisted the pegs again to make the dead man’s
tuning, and they then set in playing a piece slightly reminiscent of
Bonaparte’s Retreat, which some name General Washington’s tune.
This
was softer, more meditative, yet nevertheless grim as death. When
the
minor key drifted in it was like shadows under trees, and the piece
called up something of dark woods, lantern light. It was awful
old
music in one of the ancient modalities, music that sums up a culture
and is the true expression of its inner life.Birch said, Jesus wept. The fit’s took them now.
None of the Guard had ever heard fiddle and banjo played together in
that tuning, nor had they heard playing of such strength and rhythm
applied to musical themes so direful and elegiac. Pangle’s use of
the
thumb on the fifth string and dropping to the second was an especial
thing of arrogant wonder. It was like ringing a dinner bell, yet
solemn. His other two fingers worked in a mere hard, groping
style,
but one honed to brutish perfection. Stobrod’s fingers on the
fiddle
neck found patterns that seemed set firm as the laws of nature.
There
was a deliberation, a study, to their clamping of the strings that was
wholly absent from the reckless bowing of the right hand. What
lyric
Stobrod sang recounted a dream — his or some fictive speaker’s
–
said to have been dreamed on a bed of hemlocks and containing a rich
vision of lost love, the passage of awful time, a girl wearing a mantle
of green. The words without music would have seemed hardly fuller
in
detail than a telegraphic message, but together they made a complete
world.When the song fell closed, Birch said to Teague, Good God, these is
holy men. Their mind turns on matters kept secret from the likes
of
you and me.
