Harmonies in Fiddle Tunes (Boys Them Buzzards Are Flying)

We're going to talk today about harmonies in fiddle tunes . Harmonies sound so good . A good harmony , which is basically a line that matches the shape of a melody but generally sticks to the notes that are in the chords or in the scale that's happening right then , can really really add to a fiddle tune .

Of course , you need two players usually to play harmonies , so we don't always get to practice them as much as some of the other parts of fiddling , but they are so fun to have as a tool to collaborate . People do worry a little bit about the rules for when you harmonize and when you can't harmonize . We'll get to that .

Harmony is a little bit like a spice . You know , in cooking it's rarely completely unwelcome . You don't want all your food to be bland , but you have to know when to use it . Use it in reasonable doses . To prepare for this , I did ask people for their take on harmonies . Which group was that ? It was the Fiddle Players group in Facebook .

If you know of that group , it's pretty big group . They have a lot of great players on there who will get in touch with you , answer questions or comment on topics . And I was asking about different genres in harmonizing . You know I'm a New England fiddler and harmony is pretty welcome in New England fiddling and in contra dances .

At a dance you don't always play harmony first . Yeah , you want to let people hear the melody , get used to the melody . If they're at a live dance they're trying to do a dance to the melody . Depending on the dancer , they may be matching up what they're doing with the music .

So you don't necessarily want to make the music overly complicated while they're learning the dance . If you're jamming or you're just playing together with other people and someone's trying to pick up the tune , well harmonizing can make that harder . So definitely at a jam you always want to save harmony for when everyone seems like they've got to handle on the tune .

That's just being polite . Harmonies add energy . So another reason to save it for maybe later in the song or in the set of dance tunes , because once you start adding harmonies the energy really ramps up and then if you take them away now , the energy's going back down . So it's a good thing to do later at the end . For the last big hurrah .

Most genres and this was kind of backed up in the discussion on my Facebook post most genres welcome harmonies in those ways , not in ways that confuse players or confuse dancers , but in that use spices carefully and in reasonable doses ways . I'll just name some .

Certainly , in Scottish Cape Breton , New England , where I come from , even French Canadian , you find it ubiquitous . In Scandinavian bluegrass country , tons of harmony , old time it is used , maybe a little less , but definitely find it in those ways here and there . And then there's Irish .

Yeah , well , you know I play Irish music and study Irish music , but I don't necessarily identify as an Irish fiddler . But I'll give you my take and I also some words from Lexi Boatwright , who is an Irish musician , an amazing fiddler and also plays the concertina really well . The harp oh my gosh , one of these people plays everything .

And with Irish music what's the analogy I want to draw here ? You know how some forms of dance or sports or sort of physical movement are all about moving in highly synchronized and predictable ways . I feel like that's kind of Irish jamming . And then others are about moving in very improvised or unexpected ways .

So musically that might be like a big sprawling old time jam where it's kind of fun . Unexpected things happen . I was jamming old time recently at Fiddler Hell with Cathy Mason , great fiddler from the band the Dead Sea Squirrels , and we were both playing a tune .

We had different versions and she said afterwards she didn't change her version and I didn't change mine . She said after well , I could have just played your version , but I thought it sounded really crunchy together . I loved it . So that kind of attitude where the mess is the thing is not part of Irish .

Irish sessions are more like that highly synchronized movement or music . So adding things like harmony is generally not completely welcome . I mean , first of all the tunes are played pretty fast and they're pretty complicated and they can be a little hard to harmonize . So many of them are modal . So people were posting this .

You know , don't harmonize at Irish sessions . In the comments and Lexi put in .

Lexi Boatwright that it very much depends on the context said what she has said to me before about Irish jam etiquette , which is that you want a lot of self-awareness and a lot of being observant , sensitive to the music of the group , so that what you're doing is fitting in and adding to it and you're not just like I know that one , and crashing in like an

elephant . We've all done that , don't worry about it if you've done that . But she did also give a rule of thumb , which was for an Irish session no harmony unless it's a song or a slow tune like a waltz , something by O'Carolin . They were also talking about Vibrado , kind of same thing for vibrato only for long notes and slow tunes .

So that's the take on Irish . But back to the genres that do use a lot of harmony . I've been playing harmonies for many years . I used to work them out slowly , note by note , either myself on the piano playing both notes , or with a friend asking them to slow down so you can work out what sounds good . You can figure it out yourself .

Lately I use chord charts to help me harmonize . I mean once I got a little better at playing charts . What I mean is seeing a tune or a song and then above it they'll have the letters written for the chords . You know a , g , a , g chord goes with this part of the tune and now it switches to D or whatever . Because I play with singers .

Especially when I play for , like church or synagogue liturgical music , I have to play a lot of harmonies with the singers and those harmonies need to fit the chords that the rhythm players are playing . So if you experiment with that , you learn to play chords . Follow chord charts . You can start to really harmonize .

You're just looking at the melody that's printed on the page there and then you're following the shape of it , either above or below , and you're keeping half an eye on the chords so that you can make sure that your notes that you're choosing following the shape of that melody .

A lot of times it's a third away or a sixth away , but then you'll get these notes where you need to adjust up or down to fit the chord . So I did get much faster at harmonizing on that . It's a good reason to get to know chords . I would encourage you to come at some point and your fiddling journey out of the melody box .

We sit in that melody box a lot , but there are a lot of other things going on in music . Listen to a pop song . Someone's singing the melody , there's a lot of other stuff going on and just because you're holding the fiddle doesn't mean you just have to do melody all the time .

So listen to some of those other things , experiment with those other things like harmony , and see what else could happen with your fiddle and how else you could contribute .

Our tune is Gary Harrison tune . Gary Harrison , a very beloved old time musician who passed away about 10 years ago and in his 50s a real heartbreak for the old time community . He wrote the tune Red Prairie Dawn which was played gosh just everywhere , gorgeous tune . So this is also his tune .

Boys Them Buzzards Are Flying what a great name Old time tune in A major . We played it in a cross A tuning A-E-A-E . It's got a crooked B part and a little more about Gary Harrison . He both fiddled and he also collected music and researched it . One of these folks lived in Indiana . Gary mostly collected music from the Midwest .

Living in Indiana he collected music from older fiddlers in Illinois and kind of all around that area put together a huge collection of music called Dear Old Illinois , big collection of transcriptions and sound recordings . I don't think it's commercially available but Gary was in a band called the New Mules which continues , I believe , to still perform .

His daughter is the fiddler now Genevieve , so she would be the one probably who you could look for her online and try to find out more about Gary's research , if you're interested . Also wrote great tunes . He had a collection of his music called Red Prairie Dawn which was , I believe , an album of tunes that he had written them all .

So great tune and we're going to play it for you here . Boy , Them Buzzards are Flying .