A helping hand
Accompanists furnish critical foundation for success at fiddle festival
By Johna Strickland
Argus Observer
Thursday, June 19, 2008 12:36 PM PDT
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| Accompanists Jeff Lincoln (center), 48, Meridian, and Rod Anderson (right), 60, Spokane, Wash., play with contestant Laura Smith, 22, Potter Valley, Calif., Wednesday at the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest and Festival in Weiser. Lincoln and Anderson attend the contest each year as a vacation, they said, and to play along. Each plays for about 14 hours each day. |
Weiser — Rod Anderson and Jeff Lincoln spend their vacation as many people do.
They camp out.
They stay up late.
They visit friends.
Then they crawl out of bed at 6 a.m. to strum a guitar for about 14 hours.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Anderson said, adding he and Lincoln sleep about four hours each night during the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest and Festival in Weiser going on this week.
As fiddlers test their talents in round after round, they ask Lincoln, Anderson and other accompanists to follow them to the stage. Most accompanists provide a guitar rhythm, a few haul a bass violin to the stage. All complement and enhance the fiddler’s music, Anderson and Lincoln said.
“We’re there to make them feel comfortable so they can concentrate on what they’re doing,” Lincoln, 48, Meridian, said.
Anderson agreed.
“The most important thing we do is keep the rhythm,” Anderson, 60, Spokane, Wash., said. “It’s kinda like riding a wave, I guess, when everything’s right and everything’s there, it goes best. ... My whole goal is to help them play the best they can. It’s satisfying.”
Lincoln and Anderson said they drop by the warm up room at 7:30 a.m. each day and start picking. Until the final round at 10:30 p.m., they play nearly nonstop — practicing with this fiddler, performing with another, jamming with old friends. Last year, Anderson, a 21-year veteran of Weiser’s contest, took the stage 194 times — 66 more times than any other accompanist.
Though some tunes repeat from fiddler to fiddler, an accompanist must know them all by memory or pick them out by ear as each contestant makes a song his or her own.
“You’re just playing with feeling, what you feel,” Anderson said of the fiddlers.
As feelings change, so do the notes, often on stage, Anderson said. People have told Anderson he stares down the fiddler as they perform, but he’s actually “concentrating on what they’re doing or about to do,” he said.
Both men attend Weiser only to play along, not to fiddle toward a title. Lincoln, though, has competed in the past. He first came to Weiser in 1989 when he was learning to play the fiddle. He met some new people, played a few tunes and decided the music he heard “was pretty cool,” he said. He’s been coming back ever since and switched to just accompanying about six or seven years ago.
Anderson just plays his World War II-era Gibson guitar, an instrument with a “deep, rich tone” and a leather strap Lincoln crafted, he said.
“I always had a guitar and kinda played around with family,” he said.
Years ago, at a fiddle workshop in Spokane, he first heard about a fiddle contest. He said he attended and got “hooked.” Now he frequents nine or 10 contests a year, as does Lincoln.
“I didn’t start coming until I was 35, an old guy, so I’m trying to get in as much as I can,” Anderson said. “I go to as many fiddle contests as I can, trying to make up lost time.”
Though both his grandfathers fiddled, Anderson rarely picks up the instrument, saying he can’t use the bow “worth a darn.”
Nonetheless, Anderson competed once and won a trophy. The division had three entrants and five trophies when someone convinced Anderson to play.
“They (the announcer) said, ‘This guy has played for 15 minutes.’ And that’s an exaggeration,” Anderson said.
While fiddlers earn the trophies and prize monies, they often pass some of the cash, traditionally 10 percent, to their accompanists, Anderson said. He used to refuse the money, especially when the youngest of fiddlers would bring him a few dollars from their tiny pot. Then parents began asking him to accept because they were trying to teach their children, Anderson said.
Lincoln and Anderson said they come to Weiser, “the granddaddy” of contests, to see friends and to teach and learn.
“We usually come to these things to steal things from other people,” Lincoln, who wears a cowboy hat and Hawaiian shirt each day, said.
The music flows in this way from person to person in a sort of “oral tradition,” Lincoln said. Anderson hopes the young fiddlers and guitarists will see where the music has come from and carry it on into the future, he said.
“Since I can’t play the fiddle, I guess this is my way of being part of it,” Anderson said.
