CAPE CORAL

Fiddle group makes music and community

Every Monday night when I’m in town I go and jam the old tunes with my musician buddies.

This is a familiar group of fiddlers who have been playing old time tunes forever around Southwest Florida. Anyone who can pick up a fiddle and learn a few melodies, either by ear or via the written notes, is welcome to join in.

We meet in members’ houses for tunes, talk and snacks. Like me, most of the members look forward to the jam sessions, where, they say, “you will find nice people.”

Old time music is a genre that flowed down the mountainsides of the Appalachians and into the living rooms and front porches of toe-tappers all around the South. The heritage is mostly Scotch-Irish, and was intricately tied to dancing your cares away, long before there was any formal therapy. It should be distinguished from its cousin, bluegrass, by this connection to actual dancing.

Bluegrass always seems to be like some wailing solo performance about lost love, dogs and trains. Not for dancing, I say. More entertainment.

Old time musicians, who are not all old, sound good when they play together. Even without knowing everything there is to know about the dynamics of music, they know how to listen to each other. Maybe it’s the nature of the music, or maybe it’s the nature of the people who are attracted to this music.

On a recent Monday night, I found myself joining in to contribute my harmonies and soak up the atmosphere. This friendly Cape Coral group proves the old musical adage about why ten fiddlers only sound twice as loud as one. You could think it’s because fiddle strings are puny as compared to brass or concussion. But some smarty-pants physicist of vibrations would probably tell you that the intensity of the music is only increased by a factor of 10, no matter what the instrument. Ten or twelve fiddles, plus accompaniment, seems just right to me.

So the numbers don’t matter. The instrument does. It’s not just about hyperphysics of sound. It’s about flowing together smoothly, and listening to one another. Stringed instruments are the instruments of choice for folk dance accompaniment, because they can excite the dance rhythms of the body, just as they have for years when there might have been only one fiddler around. Sometimes I am surprised that no one gets up to dance. Frank, a national champion clogger from 1989, probably would, but now he has a new knee.

It has been quite a few years since I first joined this group and found that sense of mutual support for myself. At the time I was going through some medical problems that had me worried, and I soon was convinced that I had the support of these new friends. We call it the “fiddle support group.” It means support for whatever skill level you are at musically, but also a concern for who you are as a person.

Longtime Cape Coral residents Frank and Connie Dennis are the anchor persons who keep the group informed and functioning. They thought they were only taking their place in the musical history of Cape Coral, but they soon found out that old time had a future as well as a past. There are about 20 regulars, and occasionally a snowbird.

Old time music, seriously played, is a group event where the musicians are, at the same time, celebrating some traditional tunes and also reinforcing their connections to their fellow players. From my perspective psychologically, playing has a way of building community and establishing support for each member of the band.

Iris says that since her crippling auto accident, she finds a sense of solace in the group. “All I could do was learn to play the fiddle,” she says.

I suppose everyone in the group has their story, given their predominant senior status, but actually, they all look pretty healthy to me. After all, these are clearly active persons, and they keep coming back, week after week.

William Morrow is a Florida licensed marriage and family therapist with offices in Cape Coral and Fort Myers. He is the author of “The Rain Doesn’t Fall Straight Down.” Learn more at http://WilliamRMorrow.blogspot.com