Surry Old Time Fiddlers Convention: Press

Dance proves it’s good to be square
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Strains of old time music and laughter could be heard echoing out of the Museum Annex Saturday night.

Long-time square dancers and novices alike took to the floor for a do-si-do or a promenade or two during the Old Time Square Dance to benefit the Surry Old Time Fiddler’s Convention. BackStep and the Mountain Park Old Time Band helped set the right mood for square dancing, flatfooting and old-fashioned fun while Caller Carol Thompson kept folks dancing in the right direction.

“BackStep is a local band that plays Round Peak Style,” said Buck Buckner, one of the organizers of the event. “The Mountain Park Old Time Band is well loved all around. They have quite a following.”

“We came to hear BackStep and just the music in general,” said Holly Hood.

“I came to hear the music. I really enjoy both of these bands,” said Nina Pinto.

Saturday night’s square dance was a continuation of the square dance held on the Friday night of the Fiddler’s Convention held earlier this year and something organizers hope will become a tradition. The Surry Old Time Fiddler’s Convention had its inaugural event on the Surry Community College campus last spring with the second annual event scheduled for 2011.

“We wanted to keep the flow going because at the Surry Old Time Fiddler’s Convention on Friday night we had a dance. We want to keep that on people’s minds,” said Buckner. “There is a dance tradition in this county and we want to keep that on the forefront and also sponsor music from this county.”

More experienced dancers went out of their way to instruct those with less experience with Thompson often taking a few minutes before calling a new dance to explain some of the basic steps. By teaching the next generation the basics of square dancing, organizers and attendees alike hope to see the tradition continue.

“I like flatfooting and square dancing,” said Pinto of why she attended the event. “It’s especially important for the younger generation. There’s an entire square of young people out there now and that’s great.”

Sylvia Lowry attended the event with her daughter who brought her two young children.

“My daughter and I love to go to square dances and we haven’t been in a long time,” she said. “I just love to square dance and listen to old time music. I’d love to take (my grandkids) to one every Friday night. That’s what I really should do.”

“I’m learning to square dance. This is my third time out,” said Mary Coerver. “I love the people here and dancing and flatfooting at festivals.”

For David and Holly Hood, it was an outing to practice their square dancing skills together. David plays old time music in a band so he is usually unable to dance with Holly.

“We’re learning. She really likes square dancing a lot,” said David. “Since I’m not playing we get to dance together tonight.”

The music and dancing were not the only tie-ins to the fiddler’s convention. The Museum Annex was decorated with handmade quilts which was the theme of the fiddler’s convention.

“At the fiddler’s convention, the backdrop to the stage was quilting because we wanted to tie into that community tradition as well,” said Buckner.

All of the proceeds from Saturday night’s dance will go to support the next fiddler’s convention. The Surry County Tourism Development Authority, Yadkin Valley Chamber of Commerce, Dobson Tourism Development Authority and Surry Community College collaborated to organize last year’s event.

Celebrating A Local Art
ROUND PEAK: SOURCE OF A STYLE OF PLAYING
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Lyle Mitchell of Winston-Salem sat in the sunshine yesterday at Surry Community College, picking the song "Chilly Winds" in the Round Peak clawhammer style on banjo.

He was there for the beginning of a new music festival, the Surry Old Time Fiddlers Convention, but was also close to the place where the music he was playing had its beginnings.

The Round Peak style began in an area near a round mountain northwest of Mount Airy, said festival workshop leader Nick McMillian, whose grandfather Dix Freeman was a player.

The Round Peak style was usually played on a fretless banjo, and featured more notes and less frailing or brush strokes, than some other styles of Old Time music.

Back then, when travel was so difficult, musical stylings varied greatly from region to region.

"If you went 10 miles down the road, the music was completely different," said McMillian.

He's been to Washington and other places to tell people about this music with roots in Surry County, which has a large Old Time music scene.

The first Surry Old Time Fiddlers Convention offered an intimate, friendly setting where children and old- timers played for fun or competed in contests featuring guitar, banjo, fiddle and dance.

There were about 110 or so players in the adult contests and 17 bands, but the youth dance contest featured just one entrant, the enthusiastic Jordan Daniel Roten, 10, of Ennis.

"I got first, second and third!" Jordan told his mother, Kathy Poindexter, as he threw his arms in the air. He learned how to clog in Alleghany County through the Junior Appalachian Musicians program.

In the youth fiddle contest, Daniel Greeson's fingers danced on the lively Old Time tune "Angeline the Baker."

Daniel, a 12-year-old student at Greensboro's Aycock Middle School and a regular in music festival competitions, won first place and the $50 prize, among six entrants.

He's been playing 6½ years, more than half his life.

"I just always wanted to play an instrument and I thought the fiddle was pretty cool," he said. "It didn't have frets and to me it looked like the hardest instrument out there at the time."

The Old Time music of the Appalachians has its roots in the even-older-time music of the British Isles. Michael and Donna Fox of Catawba County paid homage to that heritage with a rendition of "Scotland the Brave."

She was competing in the variety category on the bodhran, an Irish hand-drum, and he played the tune on a 3-string banjo he built himself. Fox loves the clawhammer style, and found that it lends itself to another instrument he makes called the dulcijo, a combination of a dulcimer and banjo. (He just sold one to someone in New Zealand, through his dulcijo.com Web site.)

Out on the bench in the sun, Mitchell practiced his Round Peak style of clawhammer.

He plays an open-back banjo that lacks the resonator that produces a louder volume on some banjos. He also employed the common tricks of stuffing a sock in the back of the banjo to dampen the sound even more and picking the strings near where the neck meets the body of the banjo.

"It gives it a little more wooden tone and softer," he said.

Chris Knopf, the assistant Surry County manager for economic development and tourism, said that about 900 to 1,000 people attended the festival, coming and going through Friday and yesterday. In the weeks to come, organizers will evaluate how it went and the economic impact, but already believe the festival was successful enough to make it a regular thing.

"I don't think there's any doubt we'll do it again," he said.

McMillian said that the focus of the festival will remain on the people who play.

"For us we wanted to do it mainly for the musicians, getting them good prize money and letting them come to a festival and be free about letting people play whatever they have to offer," he said.