*I Feel Those Appalachian Mountain Breezes Again- I Hear Those Lonesome Fiddles- A CD Review

Click on the headline to link ota "YouTube" film clip of one of the fiddlers on the CD under review, J.P. Fraley. Sorry, I could not find "Annadeene's Waltz" mentioned below for you to hear here.

CD Review

The Art Of Traditional Fiddle: From The North American Tradition Series, Rounder Records, 2001

Over the past couple of years my interest in mountain music, the music that formed part of my parental heritage, has increased as a quick search of such entries in this space attest to. Those reviews have run the gamut from the famous, and important, work of the various Carter Family combinations (and generations) to the "discovery" by the folk revivalists of the 1960s of the likes of banjo player Roscoe Holcomb to the interest by urban folk artists of that period like the Greenbriar Boys and The New Lost City Ramblers. One of the driving forces of that simple, plain music is the banjo; another is, as under review here, the fiddle.

Today, in this space, I am also reviewing a tribute album celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Appleseed Records (2007), now a fixture in preserving folk and protest music. I mentioned there that certain record labels have gained a niche for themselves in music history by establishing, driving, or preserving certain traditions. That is the case here with Rounder Records who for over forty years has put together off-beat, but extremely valuable, compilations of traditional music from the shores of Cape Breton to Appalachia to Western America.

In the Appleseed review I noted that for the history of the label there is a more than informative booklet that came with that 2-disc CD set, including plenty of discology-type information about each track. For this CD there is also a very informative booklet (as is usual with Rounder products), also including plenty of discology-type information about each track. That leaves the final question of what is good here. That is a harder question than usual in that everything here is an instrumental featuring the fiddle so it is driven more by mood than anything else. The mood, as described in the headline- mountain breezes and lonesome fiddles. And you should think of this compilation that way as well, especially as some of the pieces are very short. The one that you MUST listen and that kind of evokes everything I am trying to describe is J.P. Fraley's "Annadeene's Waltz". Heaven by fiddle.