When you jam, you shoot for fun and participation, not showing off

Well, the other day Nancy called me and said, “Hey, we’re going to have a jam over at the house.”  Jim Brown and his daughter are coming to play fiddle, and a couple of neighbors are coming, one plays the guitar.”  So I went.  We had a grand time.

Taking turns ain’t so bad.

Jam sessions used to terrify my when I was still learning the “discography,” as they say.  The bluegrass, celtic, Irish, old-time and folk worlds are an oral tradition of literally thousands of songs.  Just the familiar American fiddle tunes common in jams, like “Blackberry Blossom,” “Bill Cheatham,” “Whisky Before Breakfast,” “Salt Creek” and so on, number in the hundreds.  And there are different ways they are played.  Anyone wanting to learn guitar, and especially folk and bluegrass music, does well to practice these tunes until the most common 30-50 of them are familiar to you.

The most powerful truth about “fiddle tunes” is that they were originally not for performing but playing together and dancing.  In other words, they were communal.  It was something people did before blood-spurting video games, cruising the next and texting, all solitary expressions that tell who we are.  Modern Airports are museums of eccentric anonymity—looking at their screens and ears plugged with those ubiquitous white Apple ear deafeners.  Lots of people carrying instruments somewhere, but not a dern one of us pulls it out of the case and gathers new friends to pick.  Shame.  It would sure help us forget how much we hate the airlines.

When you jam, you shoot for fun and participation, not showing off.  Off course, plenty of the latter happens, but it’s better if you don’t go for it.  Showing everybody else up is, well, obnoxious, same as in regular life.  It’s like beating your two year old in basketball.  And it proves what?

Anyway, the world of this music is a world of sharing, courtesy, respect and encouragement.  Not mostly about showy breaks, but all things decently, in order, and as widely involving as possible.  I’m reading Blue Ridge Music Trails of North Carolina, and in it, the author cites the “Ten Commandments of Jamming” by Laura Pharis.[i]  Here they are, in case you decide to gather a quick jam at the airport next time so it can have a smidge of humanity amid the sterility of moving masses on the flying tubes.

1. Thou shalt not forsake the beat.

2. Thou shalt always play in tune.

3. Thou shalt arrange thyselves in a circle so thou mayest hear and see the other musicians and thou shalt play in accord with the group.

4. Thou shalt commence and cease playing in unison.

5. Thou shalt stick out thine own foot or lift up thine own voice and cry, “This is it!” if thou hast been the one to begin the song, this in order to endeth the tune, which otherwise wilt go on and on forever and forevermore.

6. Thou shalt concentrate and not confound the music by mixing up the A part and the B part. If thou should sinneth in this, or make any mistake that is unclean, thou mayest atone for thy transgression by reentering the tune in the proper place and playing thereafter in time.

7. Thou shalt be mindful of the key of the banjo, and play many tunes in that key, for the banjo is but a lowly instrument which must be retuned each time there is a key change.

8. Thou shalt not speed up nor slow down when playing a tune, for such is an abomination.

9. Thou shalt not noodle by thine ownself on a tune which the other musicians know not, unless thou art asked or unless thou art teaching that tune, for it is an abomination and the other musicians will not hold thee guiltless, and shall take thee off their computer lists, yea, even unto the third and fourth generations. Thou shalt not come to impress others with thine own amazing talents, but will adhere to the song, which shall be the center around which all musicians play.

10. Thou shalt play well and have fun.

 Far as I’m concerned, ought to send it to the United Nations, Congress, and the G8.  Some good jamming would resolve many of the biggest diplomatic crises of our time.  Look at the dictators and  tyrants of history.  You wouldn’t find a banjo or mandolin within a mile of ‘em.  That’s where the problems started.  As the late Briscoe Darlin once said on Andy Griffith, “You got time to breathe, you got time for music.”  Or, a man that ain’t got time to pick a tune, well, he’s trouble waitin’ to happen.”  Stay back so the explosion doesn’t get you.