Capturing The Magic

Most every moment playing oldtime is lost to eternity, and that, perhaps, is a great part of its joy. As we sit with friends old and new, we dig into the now, riding the...

Tricia Spencer: interview + tunes

Like all performers and teaching musicians, Tricia Spencer’s life looks a lot different this year. While she’d typically be in the middle of festival season and travelling to oldtime camps around the country to...

Swedish oldtime fiddler Agnes Brogeby: interview + tunes

I'm from Sweden. I grew up in Stockholm, but now live in Gothenburg in the south of Sweden. I've been playing oldtime for about ten years, but got introduced to it before I was...

Clarke Buehling: interview & tunes

My first exposure to old-time music was probably when Hobart Smith came to perform at my high school outside of Chicago. Within a few weeks, I had gone down to The Old Town folk school...

“Maybe the way forward is to dig deeper into the past”: interview and tunes...

I haven’t listened to or seen this interview since I did it at Clifftop, and as it was conducted in the crazy haze that is the Appalachian String Band Festival, I don’t remember what...

Breathing new life into Missouri fiddling: John P. Williams

Introduction John P. Williams is an oldtime fiddler from Madison, Missouri who grew up deeply entrenched in the tradition of Missouri fiddling. John was a regular attendee of the Bethel Youth Fiddle Camp and apprenticed...

“It’s the tunes that matter and the people that play them.”

Many people have told me over the last several years that I certainly have lived an interesting and exciting life. I was orphaned at birth, then later adopted from the Children’s Home Society and...

George Jackson – interview + tunes

I grew up about as far away geographically from the regions where old-time music originated as you could imagine, but American culture was all around me in my home country of New Zealand, in...

Aviva Steigmeyer: interview + tunes

I grew up in Washington state and started playing old-time music when I was 18 years old. My parents were migrant fruit pickers in the 1970s and ‘80s and both are writers and artists,...

Meredith McIntosh: interview + tunes

Old Time Music came to me after I had not played any music for several years.  My mother taught piano and music in the elementary school and my dad played sax in college and the...