Transcript: Canadian Folk Fiddling

[Howard Spring:] April and Cody, thanks very much for doing this. We’re very excited about this. Can we start by just you saying a few things about yourself and the music that you’re going to play and talk about?

[April Verch:] Yeah.

[Cody Walters:] Sure.

[April Verch:] Of course. So my name is April Verch. And I grew up in Pembroke, Ontario in the Ottawa Valley. And this is my husband, Cody Walters.

[Cody Walters:] Hello, everybody.

[April Verch:] Also band mate. We’ve been playing music together in the April Verch Band since 2007. Yeah. And we’re just going to give you an overview of some of the stuff that we like to play and some of the stuff that I grew up with, which is namely the Canadian fiddle tradition to start, that’s my roots. And so maybe we’ll warm up with a couple of tunes before we talk more about it. Just give you a sense of what it is we do [laughter].

[Cody Walters:] Yeah.

[April Verch:] So we’re going to play a couple of traditional tunes. These tunes definitely came to us from Ireland and Scotland, as many of the traditional tunes have sort of crossed genres over the years. These are two good examples of that. Both in the key of D and we’ll play a bit of St. Anne’s Reel and Whiskey Before Breakfast, and we’ll play them in kind of old-time Canadian style.

[ Music ]

[Howard Spring:] Great. You said that was a kind of an old Canadian style. What do you mean by that?

[April Verch:] Yeah. So, it’s interesting. I guess what I meant was, you know, those are the types of fiddle tunes that there are certain tunes that no matter where you go in the world, if someone says they play the fiddle, you can probably safely pull them out and that other fiddle player will know them. So like if I was in Scotland or Ireland or if I was in a Bluegrass Jam or even, you know, when we’re touring like in Scandinavia, if there’s a fiddler from the Scandinavian fiddle tradition and they love the fiddle and they know they’re going to be jamming with people from all over, those are two of the tunes they might learn. So you can sort of expect to hear those tunes played in a lot of different ways. And what I was trying to do was play them the way I heard them growing up. And the Ottawa Valley style is what I would consider one of the old-time Canadian styles. So, what I mean by that, and, you know, I haven’t done extensive research on this, but it’s something that I’ve just sort of come to my own conclusion about. So we have these regional styles of fiddling across Canada. And there are some that are very specific. They sound like the people that settled there in particular. So for example, the Cape Breton style sounds very Scottish, the French Canadian style is very French and Irish from those settlers in Quebec, the Metis style sounds like our First Nations in French and Scottish. It’s a little bit easier to pinpoint those styles. They have things about them that make them sound that way. And then we have all of these other styles in Canada that are kind of a melting pot. So, growing up in the Ottawa Valley, I learnt the Ottawa Valley style and was always taught about how our style developed in the lumber camps, which was the main industry. So, those people were French, Irish, Scottish, German and Polish. So now, you know, we’ve got a bunch of things going on there and it’s a little harder to play a tune and say, and that comes from the Polish people. You know it’s just [laughter] — And so, what I’ve sort of figured out is that in the late 1950s, I think it was around 1957, Google would tell us, the CBC started the Don Messer show. Don Messer’s Jubilee, which was a weekly program. And it in some regards, it was the first time that the same Canadian fiddle sound was being heard across the country. And Don Messer was a great fiddler. He was from the Maritimes, but he had this style. He was classically trained for one thing. So, his playing was very clean unlike a rural fiddler that was maybe more raw sounding, he was a bit more refined. That was just part of how he played. And he played straight-ahead, driving dance beats, not a whole lot of ornamentation. And so if you lived in Cape Breton or you lived in on the West Coast or you lived in Quebec, I mean, it was a huge success. The show ran forever. And everybody was tuned into the Don Messer show. And people started to emulate his style, which was one of those styles that was kind of the melting pot. And so, when we say old-time Canadian, I feel like it’s not the oldest fiddle style in Canada by any means. I feel it means you play one of the styles that is a melting pot, and sort of sounds like what Don Messer would have played.

[Howard Spring:] Great answer.

[April Verch:] Does that make sense [laughter]?

[Howard Spring:] That is a good answer.

[April Verch:] Yeah, it’s, you know, because there’s — like, there’s so many little pockets, like so, I was always taught that about the Ottawa Valley, those sort of five groups of people. But I know fiddlers that live in the Ottawa Valley between Killaloe and Wilno where there’s a strong Ukrainian settlement and tradition, and so they play Ukrainian tunes, but they play Ottawa Valley tunes too, like, you can — it can just — you can just find these pockets everywhere. Saying I lived in Saskatchewan for a while, you know, where there was also more of a Ukrainian influence, but their fiddle music, because it was a melting pot still just sounded old-time. It was just — There’s something about that. And I think a lot of it has to do with the dance tradition as well. But that’s just something I’ve observed. Yeah. I mean, people started to play like Don Messer, and he wrote tunes and people — well, I mean, I think a lot of his contemporaries saw how successful he was. And so, they were going to play and write like that, too [laughter]. They caught on. Yeah.

[Howard Spring:] Sure. That makes a lot of sense. I want you play another tune, and we’ll talk some more after.

[April Verch:] OK, cool. Maybe we’ll play on waltz. Let’s play the Thomas Fraser Memorial Waltz. That’s in D.

[Cody Walters:] D.

[April Verch:] So this is one that I wrote, but I tried to write it in that tradition. I’ll just say before we play it that part of my upbringing was my parents were huge fans of the Ottawa Valley music scene. And so, when they were dating when they were young, they went to the local dance hall every weekend for entertainment. That’s just what they did. And so, when my sister and I came along, that’s what we did, too. We went to dances and jamborees and jam sessions. And I was really lucky to get to grow up playing for dances and beside other fiddlers which isn’t always the case anymore. And my dad taught me early on that you could have the best tone and you could play more in tune than the older fiddlers. But if you couldn’t fill the dance floor, then what was the point [laughter]? And so whenever –

[Howard Spring:] Right. Right on.

[April Verch:] — whenever I play a waltz, I think of that still. And when I write a waltz, that’s what’s in my mind. What’s going to get people on the dance floor? So I wrote this tune when we were at a festival in the Shetland Islands. It was called the Thomas Fraser Memorial Festival. He was a great artist from the Shetlands and I wrote it in his honour.

[ Music ]

[Howard Spring:] Great. When you write a tune or when you learn tune, I’m assuming it’s all by ear. Is that right? Or is any of this notated? How do you learn and also play this?

[April Verch:] Yeah. I do read music now. But I think just the nature of the stuff that we like to play the most isn’t always notated.

[Cody Walters:] No.

[April Verch:] And we really love listening to the oldest version of things that we can find. So like, even, you know, I have this great book of old-time tunes and I want to learn a new tune, I might go to it and sort of learn it but then end up wanting to know how the oldest source recording fiddler played it. And so, you know, so, usually we just start there if we can with the recording. That’s something that I think has changed a lot even since I started playing. I started playing when I was six. And my first teacher was self-thought. And he was young. He was probably 16 when I started taking lessons from him. He was a great fiddler. He’d been shown by other fiddlers who were self-taught a little bit. And so, I learnt by ear. He would take the tune for me on a cassette back then, and I go home and learn it and come back the next week. And later, I learnt to read because I started classical lessons, which was, actually, because so many fiddlers back then had been shown the basics, but few of them had formal training. And so like, one time, I was at a fiddle contest and the judges came up to my parents later and said, you know, she’s doing pretty good. But the thing is, the way she’s holding her instrument, she’s not really going to be able to get that much better. So, it might not be a bad idea, even though she doesn’t want to play the violin for her to study some violin, because it’ll make her a better fiddle player in the long run, you know, which I really fought against at first. And it was really hard, because I knew how to play and then I had this like, stare at the page and I couldn’t do it. So it’s frustrating. But that’s really changed. I think that there are so many people now, like me, that know technically how to do things and pass that on, that young people learning to play the fiddle today are learning from people that, you know, have that technical ability. And so, that has also changed the music to some degree. Like, there’s a lot of times that I will learn an old-time American tune and Cody and I will look at each other and hear the source recording and I know that with the training I have, I can never play it exactly like they did. Because there’s like stuff that they did because they didn’t have that knowledge and they found other ways of going about it and it’s just the best [laughter]. Like, sometimes, I feel like it hinders us, even though it helps us in a lot of ways. But that’s like change just in the last, you know, 30, 40 years.

[Cody Walters:] Yeah.

[April Verch:] The amount of fiddle players who are also classically trained. Yeah.

[Howard Spring:] Do you think something is lost with classical training? I know if something’s gained, there is something lost.

[April Verch:] Yeah.

[Howard Spring:] OK.

[April Verch:] Maybe, I don’t know. It’s sort of hard because there’s other things that have changed, too. It sort of hard to pinpoint like what causes that loss and or what the combination is. I think another big thing, you know, I talked a little bit about growing up playing for dances. That doesn’t happen anymore, because dancing is not what we do for entertainment anymore on the weekend, like it was for my parents. And so, when I was little and we would go to a fiddle contest, which was really just an excuse to hang out with other people that like to fiddle, it wasn’t about the contest, you know, but the contest would end with a dance and the competitors will get up and play for the dance. And, you know, it used to be that if you played the fiddle, dancing is what you did for entertainment way back when. So, every fiddler knew how to dance. So then by the time I was, you know, 13, contests were really popular and got really big and they went too long, so that there was no more dance. So now there’s no — there’s not as many social dances, generally speaking, as there were. And you have a generation of fiddlers that may not know how to dance or have never played for a dance. Like certainly now, during the pandemic, I’m teaching private lessons on Zoom, and so, I can’t even, you know, I can sort of show them but I can’t just be there to say now do this waltz step with me, because if you can do the waltz, you’ll feel that through your bow arm and you’ll feel that in your body and you’ll play it differently. I think that’s been a huge loss for the fiddle tradition in Canada is the loss of social dancing. Not that it’s gone, you know, I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of people learning to step dance. Step dancing is doing great, but like –

[Cody Walters:] They’re popular. Yeah.

[April Verch:] Yeah. But the square dancing and just like the couple dancing is –

[Howard Spring:] Socializing. Yeah.

[April Verch:] Yeah, like it was. So I think that’s a contributor. Yeah, dancing, training. And yeah, especially lately, just the amount of, of distance rather than in person, there’s something about playing knee to knee with somebody that I feel bad for the — for my younger students, you know, during the pandemic that have just gotten into it and haven’t had that yet.

[Cody Walters:] Yeah.

[April Verch:] So, when that comes back, that’ll help [laughter].

[Howard Spring:] Sure, sure. Do you want to play something else?

[April Verch:] Sure.

[Howard Spring:] And talk some more.

[April Verch:] Yeah. Maybe we’ll play French Canadian tune just to play something and share something that’s a little bit different than old-time Canadian. So this is a tune called William Gagnon. I’m not French Canadian so I will play this as close as I can to how a fiddler from Quebec might play it with that disclaimer [laughter], that it’s not as good as they would. But a lot of the Quebecois tunes are crooked, which is not common in the old-time Canadian tradition. So, those –

[Howard Spring:] What do you mean crooked?

[April Verch:] Yeah. So those melting pot styles are going to be straight. What I mean by crooked is a couple of things. So you’re going to have extra beats or missing beats. So it’s going to change time signature. So, you know, instead of the real being just in two, four, you’ll have a bar of three or a bar of one depending on how you want to look at it [laughter].

[Cody Walters:] Yeah [laughter].

[April Verch:] So it can — it’s crooked in that sense. And then not all of the tunes are crooked and formed, but this one is a good example. The way I make sense of this tune in my head is, you know, usually a fiddle tune will be A part twice, AA, B part twice, BB. This one is ABC, ABC, DE. And all of the — all of those parts are different lengths. So it’s Uber crooked [laughter].

[ Music ]

[Howard Spring:] Great. So, is the difference between what you just played and sort of battle time Canadian style, it’s just a matter the crookedness or is there something else going on that’s different?

[April Verch:] Yeah, there’s something else going on because not all French Canadian tunes are crooked. I think part of it is that rather than all of these different influences you have mostly French and Irish, so you’re going to have a little bit more, sometimes the Celtic influence, so whether it’s Cape Breton with the Scottish or any style that has some of that Irish will have some of the bode triplet.

[ Music ]

Where you’re just doing those separately quickly. You’re not going to find that as much in old-time, usually. That’s one of the things. The form of the tunes, also, the different styles have different types of tunes in the repertoire. So old-time Canadian, you know, you’re going to have waltzes, jigs, reels, maybe a schottische two-step polka. In Cape Breton, you’re going to have stress phase and marches and slow errors and laments that you don’t have in other places. In Quebec, you’ll have a quadrille, a cotillion, which you don’t have in other, you know. So, sometimes it’s the actual type of tune or the dance that it came from. What else? Some of it’s in the technique. So, the French tunes have a lift and a bounce. It’s almost a syncopation in the tune. And even if it’s not exactly a syncopation, it’s — there’s a — it’s very common to do this lift with your bow when you’re teaching fiddle and you’re trying to — people are like, how do I know whether I go up or down? You often say, go down on the downbeat, wherever you tap your foot, go down. And then when you teach somebody a French Canadian or a Metis tune you say, except. So it’s very common for them to slur across the bar line, which we don’t do in old-time and to go up on that downbeat, so.

[ Music ]

But not always, because it sounds like a hiccup if you do it too much. Sometimes I show people that trick to get the lift, and then they do it everywhere. And it’s like, ah. But — So that’s part of it. And they also cross tune their fiddles sometimes in the Quebecois tradition, also in Cape Breton, maybe a little bit in the Metis tradition, which you wouldn’t have in old-time. Yeah. So if I were going to play — Oh, sorry, go ahead, Howard.

[Howard Spring:] I was just going to ask you, what do you mean by cross tune?

[April Verch:] So, that’s where you take — So usually in standard tuning on the fiddle would be EA, DG. And so, if you take any one of those strings and make it something else, you’ve crossed tuned. So there’s a variety of different cross tunings. And we can talk more about that. So I wanted to see if I could try to show you if I tried to play William Gagnon in an old-time Canadian style, which I’ve never tried to do, how the [inaudible].

[Howard Spring:] OK.

[ Music ]

[April Verch:] Like I’m almost not play the notes that way. And then, so contrasted with.

[ Music ]

So some of it is ornamentation.

[Howard Spring:] So it’s almost like a question of rhythm and accent.

[April Verch:] Exactly. Yeah, that’s a good summary of it. And also the ornamentation vary somewhat between styles, but not as much. I think mostly our Canadian fiddle traditions borrow from the Celtic ornamentation that you’d hear an Irish or Scottish player use. It might be neat to sort of contrast. So, obviously the Metis fiddle tradition, French, and Scottish and First Nations has a lot in common with the French Canadian tradition. And what’s interesting is that French Canadian tunes are French Canadian tunes. They’ve been, you know, added to the repertoire by fiddlers from there. And so, it makes sense that they’re crooked. Metis tunes are also crooked in similar ways. But a lot of Metis fiddlers play tunes that are common. You know how I said like St. Anne’s Reel and Whiskey Before Breakfast, everybody plays them? Well, there are Metis versions of those tunes that are crooked. So they’re not Metis tunes, but the versions of them are crooked and very cool. So I can give you an example of one of those. So I’ll play a little bit of Arkansas Traveller, like, most people would play it [laughter].

[ Music ]

OK. And so, here’s a version that John Arcand who is a master Metis fiddler from Saskatchewan. He remembers his ancestors playing Arkansas Traveller this way. And so a lot of people affectionately call this Arcand-Saw Traveller in John Arcand’s honour [laughter].

[ Music ]

So I was trying not to tap my foot there, so it wouldn’t be too loud on the mic. But that reminded me that in the Metis and the French Canadian tradition, they use their feet to accompany the fiddle. I’m not very good at it. But it’s sort of a rhythm where your heel and your toe would do the one and the two. So it’d be like one, two, one, two. And your other foot would do the end of two, one, two, and one, two, and one, two [stomping]. So they’re doing that while they’re playing. And they have –

[Howard Spring:] Right.

[April Verch:] — swiftly strong thighs.

[Howard Spring:] Right. Does — So does that rhythm stay the same? Or do they use variations of it or?

[April Verch:] It pretty much stays the same while they’re playing although some people have taken it and made it a little fancier, especially in the Acadian tradition. They almost — It’s almost like chair step dancing, you know. So it’s no longer just what you do while you’re playing, it’s actually like a choreographed thing and they’ll do it in sync, get up and walk around the chair and come back and everything. So a bit of both. In Cape Breton, they do the heel toe, so they just do the one, two rocking up their foot as they play. That’s very common, traditional.

[Ryan Bruce:] With the toe tapping or the heel and the toe, does that change with the crooked tunes? And I guess my more general question is, how are the crooked tunes tied to dancing?

[April Verch:] Oh, yeah, great question. No, typically the rhythm of the feet doesn’t change even if it’s a crooked tune. It all just comes out in the wash [laughter]. I think, like I said, I don’t do it very well and it’s not part of my tradition. So, I hope I’m telling you correctly. But for my experience when I’ve tried it with a crooked tune, I didn’t have to change anything and it was OK. And what was the second part of your question? Oh, yeah. How’s it fit in with the dancing? So, yeah, there — I mean, there are some legends out there and I don’t know how much truth is to them, like, I have heard people say that that French Canadian fiddlers — that the dances were made first and the dancers weren’t keeping track and so the fiddlers changed their tune to fit the dance. I don’t know. There is a tune, a Metis tune called the Red River Jig. So, we have a lot of, you know, all over Canada, you have square dancing and social dancing. And then you have some specific types of step dancing, like Cape Breton step dancing, or Arcadian step dancing or Ottawa Valley step dancing, French Canadian step dancing, all slightly different from each other. The Metis people have what they call the Red River Jig, which is a little bit related to step dancing, but it’s kind of its own thing. And it’s neat because you do — first of all, jig in the sense of dance, so it’s not in six, eight. It’s called the Red River Jig is the tune and that’s the name of the dance. And you do the Red River Jig dance to the tune called the Red River Jig. So, one time I attended a competition for Red River Jigging and the poor fiddler had to play that same tune all day, whereas, at a step dancing competition, you can dance to any real. And it’s sort of the A part, so it’s a crooked tune, which is why your question made me think of this. So, it’s a crooked tune but the dance is written in such a way that in the A part, they sort of do a circle step, which is always the same, the B part, you do the change, which is the fancy step and you show your stuff and then you go back to the circle step. And there are a lot of different versions of the Red River Jig, like every Metis, Fiddler plays it a bit differently. And even a bit differently, in the sense of, it’s crooked in different places. So it’s kind of amazing. So, I haven’t played it in a long time. I’ll try a little bit of it. My version, I think, would be close to John Arcand’s just because he’s the Metis fiddler that I know and have hung out with the most. Have been lucky to sort of grow up around him. And a lot of them would tune their fiddle to A for this, but I’m not going to do that.

[ Music ]

So the A part — A Metis fiddler told me one time, so, you know, because they have their own different crooked versions, he was explaining the dance to me, and the A part is up high on the A and the E string, and the B part is down low on the D and the G. And he said, you just keep circling around and when the fiddler hits the big strings, then you go [laughter]. And I thought that made a lot of sense. It’s like, you never know what crooked it’s going to be. So, when they get down there to the G you better do your fancy stuff [laughter]. Yeah, you want to switch to banjo?

[Cody Walters:] Sure.

[April Verch:] Give me as well.

[Ryan Bruce:] Actually, yeah, maybe while you’re switching, I have another question about ornamentation because people who might have been brought up with a music tradition and played maybe a different instrument, hear the word ornament, and they might think of a trill or turn or something like that. What kind of ornaments do you use in the fiddle tradition? What — And how would they maybe differ between one regional style and another?

[April Verch:] So, most of the ones that I use would be in any of those old-time Canadian styles just because that’s what I grew up with. And it’s exactly what you’re talking about, a trill where it’s not the repeated trill [music], it’s just a single trill. So, going up a melody note and back. We don’t do as many roles or turns. So like in Irish music you’ll hear [music]. So if my note was an F, I might go F up a step back to the F, below the F and back. So you’d have five [music]. That doesn’t fit into a lot of old-time Canadian tunes. Our Canadian tunes are nodi [phonetic] and don’t leave room for that as much. But then again, you know, we have some of those Irish tunes that have made their way into the repertoire. So then you could fit one in. Hammer on where you anticipate the melody note. So if my note was the F sharp, then I might play a quick E before it. So instead of going [music], I would go [music]. Or, if I was coming down in the melody, I would do the same thing, but I call it a pull off. So instead of going [music], I might go [music] where I’m just pushing that one note out of the way. Lots of slides, and they can be kind of big [music] or really subtle, so that you hardly hear them. Runs, so anytime you’re coming up to a third finger, you know, you might [music] just run up to it. Or if you’re having open you [music] come down. That’s the main stuff for left hand. As far as the right hand, we talked a bit about that bowed triplet that will make its way in. There’s also something that I call a ghost note. And every one of these ornaments has 50 different names, and it just depends who you ask. So, this is just my version. But a ghost note to me, is almost more of a groove thing, but I still kind of considered an ornament. So like if I was playing [music] where I have those two up-bows, it sounds very straight to play it like that [music]. So if I do a quick, silent down-bow in between the two ups, so.

[ Music ]

And if — When I speed that up, if I just relax, sometimes it’ll be silent, sometimes it’ll make a squeak or a hit. But it gives that groove and that lift. So you get.

[ Music ]

So that’s sort of an ornament, but it’s also sort of a style thing. And then just the way you bow a passage is changing it and varying it. This is a good question because coming from the Canadian fiddle tradition we take a tune and we play the melody and then we vary it. But we don’t improvise as a rule. It wasn’t part of the tradition. Lots of Canadian fiddlers are great improvisers now. But like, originally, it was about the melody and just changing it to keep it interesting. And so sometimes that’s just how you bow it. Sometimes it’s taking a nodi section and holding a note out, or you have a place where there’s a long note and so you double it or you triple it. It’s very basic ways, but it’s endless possibilities. Dynamics, where you play it in the bow, if you’re playing here versus hear you have a different feel to it. So yeah, you know, I think Canadian fiddlers because they didn’t improvise came up with these really cool ways of keeping a tune fresh, both for the player and the listener. And the other thing that came out of that melody based tradition and the dance tradition was stringing tunes together in a medley. So, you know, if you’re playing for a square dance and you’re going to play a jig rather than play that jig 20 times and play four jigs, five times each, you know. And so, that’s a big part of the tradition as well.

[Ryan Bruce:] How much do you ornament, like how much of a piece is ornamented in a performance versus something that you said would be straight? And do you tend to play the same ornaments each time you play the same tune? Or does that change with every performance as well?

[April Verch:] Excellent questions. I’ll start with the last one. No, like, I hardly ever play a tune the same way twice. So like, the ornaments aren’t going to happen in the same places. That being said, it’s kind of like, you know, how you have comfortable licks, so, there’s certain stuff that you’re good at, that you fall back on. And so even though I’m saying I don’t play the same way twice, there’s certain things that every time I play a certain tune that I like and sounds good and so it might not happen in the same place. And what precedes it and comes after, it’s not the same, but there’s just like there’s — it’s almost like there are ornaments that become licks [laughter] that I depend on. If — I hope that makes sense. And then, as far as the amount of ornamentation, it depends a lot on the tune, but I — and the style. But I would say that I really try to pay tribute to the tune, the melody and the tradition, the genre I’m pulling it from the first time through, because I want the listener to know what was intended. And that can be a fine balance because, you know, I grew up in the Ottawa Valley. Well, I just played a whole bunch of other Canadian styles for you, and I’m not a native of those styles. So I do my best to play them, you know, in a way that gives an idea of the best I can do from that style before I mess with them, you know, and put in ornaments that I might have pulled or a bowing for example. Now that I played and loved old-time American stuff as well, well, I’m not from there either, but then they have some bowing stuff that’s cool that we don’t do in Canada and some of it sounds great and Canadian tunes, well, I’m not going to throw that in until the second or third or fourth time through, so that, you know, I’m hopefully walking that line. And that’s something that I started decided early on. It’s like, it’s important to me to have my own sound, my own style because, you know, as a teenager going to fiddle camps I noticed that all of my friends picked a favourite fiddler and followed them around and learnt all of their tunes and they sounded like little clones. And I remember thinking, OK, we all say we want to make a living playing the fiddle, but how are you guys going to do that because you sound just like them? Don’t you want to sound like yourself? And so I worked really hard to sound like myself. And then, at some point, I got older and thought, OK, but it’s OK to sound like me, but I’ve got to get out of the way. I have to get out of the way of the music. It’s not about me, it’s about this tune, it’s about this fiddler that I learnt it from, it’s about the place that it came from, and that has to happen first. And so I guess that’s why I say the first couple of times through, that’s what I’m thinking. I’m not thinking, how does April bow this? How do I make it cool? I’m thinking, what is this about and to the best of my ability how do I get that across [laughter]?

[Ryan Bruce:] Great, thank you.

[April Verch:] Yeah. Awesome.

[Ryan Bruce:] You guys want to play some tunes with the banjo?

[April Verch:] Yeah. Let me go — Well, are you in D?

[Cody Walters:] I am in D [music].

[April Verch:] Maybe before we change the banjo key, we’ll sing one. This is an original tune called Worth the Wait. And I guess this one sort of falls between styles. It’s just kind of folk [laughter]. It’s like [laughter] Canadian old-time meets American old-time or something. So this is a good transition maybe. And then we’ll cross tune both instruments to A, and talk about that and play a couple of old-time American tunes.

[Cody Walters:] Ready?

[April Verch:] Yeah.

[ Singing ]

[Howard Spring:] That’s a beautiful song, April.

[April Verch:] Thank you

[Howard Spring:] Cody, could I ask you something about the banjo there? Are you use — Is that a clawhammer technique or?

[Cody Walters:] Yeah, that’s right. It’s all done with the backs of my fingernails. I don’t use picks or anything like that. And everything is a downward stroke. And the basic rhythm of it is, they call it the bum-ditty. Bum ditty [music]. So that’s the basic right hand motion. So it’s kind of — Your rhythm and melody are kind of both happening at the same time because you’re — you have that rhythm always going underneath your melody notes.

[Howard Spring:] Is that a typical mode of accompaniment when you’re playing with fiddle?

[Cody Walters:] It’s more of an old-time American tradition, traditional accompaniment to fiddle. There’s this style and there’s also a two-finger plucking style which I don’t do but it’s it sounds much different from, say, like the Scruggs-style three finger, bluegrass banjo stuff.

[April Verch:] But I think that’s one of the differences, too, is like in a lot of the Canadian traditions, the fiddle, when it’s fiddle music is the star. So you’re like, you have the fiddle and then guitar and piano or playing accompaniment.

[Cody Walters:] Right.

[April Verch:] And there’s a couple of exceptions to that like the accordion plays the melody along in the Quebecois tradition, things like that. But in the old-time American style, the fiddle and the banjo –

[Cody Walters:] Share the melody.

[April Verch:] — share the melody.

[Cody Walters:] Often.

[April Verch:] Yeah.

[Cody Walters:] Oftentimes, the banjo can’t play all the nice things that a fiddle can. So, you play the melody, but you don’t play –

[April Verch:] It’s not the exact same version.

[Cody Walters:] — all of the same melody. Yes.

[April Verch:] Which is part of the charm, because it’s very complementary.

[Cody Walters:] Yeah. Yeah.

[April Verch:] So, we’re going to A. So for me, that means my E and my A are staying the same, but my D is going up a step to an E and my G is going up a step. So I’ll have AE, AE.

[Cody Walters:] Yeah.

[Music] And I — It’ll be for me from the first string, E, C sharp, A, E again, and then the drone is also an A. So it’s two steps up from what would be a standard tuning on the banjo.

[Ryan Bruce:] How often in performances or fiddling contests are you doing this cross tuning? Or if I was to attend an event or something like that, how often would I hear that?

[April Verch:] [Background Music] So, it’s not really part of my tradition that I grew up with. So like, I only started doing it maybe 10 years ago. So you’d never hear it in a contest, because it just isn’t part of the tradition there. In an old-time American contest, I don’t know, I haven’t been to any. But for us onstage now, you know, we love some of these tunes, and so we include them. But we try to not make it a part of the show. It’s like — So our set list is all marked up with, OK, April needs to tune here, so Cody talks, and I walk to the back of the stage, and people hopefully aren’t paying attention to the fact that I’m cross tuning, you know. Like I’ll make mention, I’ll say something like, hey, this is an old-time tune and they use alternate tunings, which means this and then I’ll go do it, but he’s filling time. And then when he has to tune, I’m filling time. So, it’s happening, but it’s hopefully not like annoying [laughter]. Although we do play instruments that –

[Cody Walters:] Required tuning.

[April Verch:] — that require a lot of tuning, so probably it’s more — it’s annoying to us [laughter]. OK, so.

[ Music ]

So what’s cool about being in a tuning like this is oftentimes, you can play things in two octaves. So even though the A part is written up here [music], it’s the same fingering. And after you’ve played it a few times you dropped down and you play it down low, and it’s all growling and driving.

[Cody Walters:] On the big strings.

[April Verch:] Yeah, on the big strings. And so, you know, there’s different thoughts about the cross tunings and how they originated. Some people say that the old-timers didn’t want to have to learn different finger patterns. So, rather than change what key you’re playing in, you change the strings to be in a different key and you use the same finger pattern, could be. But also a lot of people talk about how one fiddler might often have to try and play loud enough and resonant enough for a whole roomful of dancers to hear them. And obviously, the fiddle rings in a different and bigger way in across tuning, I mean it just — because they’re all ringing sympathetically because they’re tuned similar, right? So, there is a different feel to the instrument and the resonance, so that it’s also part of it, which is why it’s so fun to — like, there’s oftentimes I can play a tune in standard tuning that’s meant to be cross tuned, but I’d just rather not play it. It’s like, it’s just such a part of how the tune has to sound [laughter].

[Music]

What do I play? You want to do Horse and Buggy and Jimmie Johnson?

[Cody Walters:] Yup.

[April Verch:] OK. So this is what happens when a Canadian girl tries to play old-time American tunes. We’re going to play a medley, which they would never do [laughter]. They tend to just play one tune for a really long time and the tunes are hard to stop. Like a lot of old-time American tunes you get into that zone and you just can’t quit them. But my Canadian nature has me stringing them together sometimes. So the first one here is called the Horse and Buggy Oh and the second is called Jimmie Johnson?

[ Music ]

Ready?

[Cody Walters:] Hmm-mm.

[April Verch:] One, two.

[ Music ]

[Howard Spring:] That was great.

[April Verch:] So one of the things that’s different about the old-time American — thank you — the old-time American stuff, bowing wise, that’s probably the biggest hardest thing for me not coming from the tradition. There’s a lot of pulsing. So, a lot of like, even though you might just be playing [music] that, you’re actually doing [music]. So [music], it becomes.

[ Music ]

So we have this sort of thing going on. Even when you can’t hear it, if you’re doing it, it comes out in the groove. And I’m still not that great at it. It’s taken me a really long time to even feel like I can play these in public and pay respect to the tradition and I’m always checking in with, you know, my mentors [laughter] on that. But, you know, the cross tuning is a big difference because you automatically get that ring. And then I’d say the bowing is the other biggest difference.

[Howard Spring:] Did you want to play something else with a banjo?

[April Verch:] Yeah. And maybe we’ll play something else in this tuning since we sort of have a rule that when we get the instruments in a tuning, we do more than one [laughter]. It takes [inaudible].

[Howard Spring:] I’m glad I ask.

[April Verch:] Maybe we’ll play — So, when I write, I sometimes try to write in a style. And so I wrote a tune called Firewood last year. That’s just kind of a long story. We had to cut our firewood a couple of times, because when we got it delivered, it was too long for our stove, wood stove. So we had to cut like three inches off of every piece before we split it and stacked it. So we were thinking about firewood a lot.

[Cody Walters:] Yup.

[April Verch:] And I tried to write this tune in the old-time American tradition. It’s modal sounding. So it’s still in A but it’s a modal. It’s crooked, which, you know, their tunes are as well often. Yeah, and it’s kind of fun to try and write a tune in a tradition but also have it sound like maybe, like, my goal with this was when someone heard it that they would think it was public domain. So it’s like not just an old-time tune but it actually sounds like it’s been around for a hundred years, hopefully, like that was what I was going for. You can decide.

[ Music ]

[Howard Spring:] So when you say one year, you try to make it sound older, is that the modal part? I mean, in other words, because it’s modal, does that make it sound older or what’s wrong?

[April Verch:] No. I don’t think so. I don’t think that that makes it sound older. Hopefully it’s just the tune itself, the melody. There are a lot of old-time tunes that are modal, but yeah, not necessarily that part of it. While we were playing that, I also wanted to say about the old-time American stuff that that’s also an umbrella term. You know, there’s Kentucky old-time is different than Virginia is different than North Carolina. I mean, every state, every region.

[Cody Walters:] Every valley.

[April Verch:] Every valley. Yeah, every holler. And I’m not as, you know, I can’t speak to that as much. Usually, we know the tunes that we learnt from that tradition. We know where they’re from. And we know the oldest person that played them, where they were from and who that was. And that’s a big part of learning that style. When you’re at an old-time jam, people don’t just call it tune and play it. They’ll often like, call the tune and then say, now are we playing so and so’s version or so and so’s version? And like, whoever knows the oldest one is obviously getting more points [laughter]. But they, you know, there’s a — it’s really a cool part of the tradition how much people pay attention to that.

[Cody Walters:] Yeah.

[April Verch:] I think that’s not true in all fiddle traditions in my experience. When I met a Canadian jam, a lot of young people don’t know who wrote Don Messer’s Breakdown. It was Done Messer, by the way. But like, even like tunes that are standards in the repertoire, people don’t know anymore who wrote them, but we don’t talk about it enough, I think. So, yeah.

[Ryan Bruce:] I’ve been thinking about something you were saying at the beginning about Don Messer, and since you’ve mentioned him in passing again, you said that he had — he was classically trained and had a clean — kind of clean technique and had — there would be some of the older players that might have played more raw. And I’m wondering, what’s the distinction? How’s that made? I’m trying to get a sense of what it sounds like to be a clean fiddle player versus a raw player.

[April Verch:] Yeah. Like, I feel like that’s part of what I was talking about. Like, I don’t know if I can give an example of what it sounds like to be raw, because I was also taught to play, you know, clean, if you will. I think actually, like, a good example of that might be just contrasting. Even though there are two different styles, those tunes that we just played that were cross tuned in A, you were hearing a lot of other strings ringing. So, we would call that a drone. So, a raw old-time Canadian fiddler who is not as trained is probably hitting other strings, even when they don’t intend to. There’s an emphasis in the old-time Canadian style of being clean of playing one note at a time and being very articulate. So even though that — articulate, not meaning all the notes have to be both separately, but if you’re slurring it, it’s clipped and it’s clean and people know exactly what you intend to be doing. But if you’re a raw player and you have less training, you probably don’t actually know how to execute that. You can’t articulate. So you might be using more slurs or slurring in a place you shouldn’t be. You’re hitting other strings. Your tone isn’t as good. And like, I mean that in maybe a good way. Like, that’s part of the thing, like, when we’re talking about, oh, I wish I could play like that guy. Yeah, you don’t — you just don’t have the facility to accomplish things in a clean way. And so, things just happen that or just sound really authentic and raw. Yeah. That’s the word I’m using to mean unrefined and yeah.

[Cody Walters:] I think it also, that lack of skill might inform their sense of style, so that they’re playing it the best way they know how and that makes them sound a certain way.

[April Verch:] Yeah.

[Cody Walters:] Give them what they can do. And I enjoy that personally, but.

[April Verch:] Yeah. And then sometimes, like, with the really old field recordings that we hear, their instruments also, probably had an effect on that. Like, they didn’t have a bridge with a good curve. It was really flat and that’s what they had or it was a homemade instrument, right? So even that’s affecting their sound and their style and what they can do and they can’t do physically on an instrument like that. OK, I’m going to go back to standard tuning here, I think.

[ Music ]

So we’ve played a lot of the styles that we talked about or planned to play. Did you want to expand on anything there? Or should we — We can give a talk and give an example of the Ottawa Valley step dance style, too. Although I won’t have as much breath left after we do that [laughter]. Fair warning.

[Howard Spring:] Sure. Let’s do the step dance style, I think.

[April Verch:] Cool. So, yeah, this style, again, I was always taught that it started in the lumber camps. And if you can picture a bunch of lumber jacks with their big gum rubber boots on, you can — and then picture what I’m doing now, you know that it’s kind of come a long way. But they did used to put nails or tacks in the bottom so that they could have a good sound on the hardwood floor. And they were sharing steps that they remembered from their homelands. So whether that was Irish or Scottish or French. And in the Ottawa Valley tradition, Donnie Gilchrist, who was born in Quebec and then moved to Ontario, he used to watch the — when he was a little kid, he would go to the pub at night and watch the lumberjacks after they’d had some water and loosened up. And he would watch them dance and was influenced by them. He was then influenced by tap dancers. And Donnie was one of the first ones to pass the tradition along. And so he had a couple of prodigies. And then they continued teaching. And so, my dance teacher was Buster Brown. And Buster took from Donnie Gilchrist. He was one of his students. And I think one of the things that changed is that I think they used to just listen to the tune and dance the tune. They were moved by the music. And then when these people tried to pass it on, they had to figure out a way to teach it. So, you know, they would break it down into steps, and you do the steps in a certain order and then you have a routine. And groups of people can learn this style, but they’re all dancing routines. And so, kind of a happy accident for me, I got sick when I was in my early teens and I couldn’t dance for a couple years. I started dancing before I started fiddling. I started at three. And when I got better and could dance again, I still remembered like the moves, but I didn’t remember any routines. And I don’t know if I was lazy or [laughter] if it was just something that I realized, but I didn’t really go back to ever forming those routines again. And so, I like to think that I’m carrying on the tradition of dancing the tune, [laughter] a little bit. And like, we were talking about earlier with the ornaments and the licks, certainly I have steps that are coming up again. I have moves that I’m relying on, but I can just like listen and do whatever I feel like in the moment.

[Howard Spring:] Do you think when you’re dancing, is that a kind of improvised dancing, you think?

[April Verch:] Yes. Yup, it’s improvised, unless, for some reason, I’m going to dance with someone else. Yeah. Yeah. When I — When we perform, and what I’ll do now is just like, yeah, whatever [laughter]. Whatever comes for good or for bad. So it’s — The Ottawa Valley style, there’s no rules. What you have to do with your hands, you don’t have to stay straight. You can flail. And the general rule is that you’re on your tippy toes. So, unless you’re stomping with your whole foot on purpose, if you’re doing a step you’re — so yeah, your heels don’t touch unless you’re doing a heel or a stomp. And so for that reason, it looks a little higher off the ground than some other styles where your flat foot. And so, you’re maybe flat and scuffing. So that’s one thing. It’s, like, it’s fairly high energy. And I think also that tap influence makes our steps a little bit more intricate than some other forms of step dancing. So that’s kind of all I can think of on that at the moment. What are you going to play?

[Cody Walters:] I don’t know.

[April Verch:] What key are you in?

[Cody Walters:] I’m in A, but I think [inaudible] –

[April Verch:] OK.

[Cody Walters:] — might be –

[April Verch:] Oh. What about Brickyard Joe?

[ Music ]

Yeah?

[Cody Walters:] Sure.

[April Verch:] That work. I like it.

[Cody Walters:] Yeah.

[April Verch:] OK. Hang on with [inaudible]. You can start.

[ Music and Stomping ]

Yeah. You just got a single tap on the bottom. So it doesn’t –

[Howard Spring:] Is that typical?

[April Verch:] Yes and no. Buster always used what was called a staccato tap. So it was a tap with a smaller tap and a little rivet. So, it wasn’t what they use in clogging is called a jingle tap where the whole thing jingles a lot, but it’s like a mini jingle tap, if you will. Should we play another tune so I can get my breath back [laughter]?

[Howard Spring:] Yes. Not to sing now. Just play.

[April Verch:] Let’s do Cauliflower.

[Cody Walters:] All right.

[April Verch:] This is a tune called Cauliflower, which I really liked to play. We learnt it recently. And I think it’s a Kentucky tune. Kentucky or Ohio, but it sounds to me like, it could be a Canadian tune. It’s nodi in the same way. And I can bow it, like a Canadian or like, I think an old-time American player would and it sounds equally as good. So I find it a fascinating example of a tune.

[ Music ]

[Howard Spring:] That was great.

[Ryan Bruce:] How much are the tap dancers thinking about the rhythms that they’re dancing? And does that change what the musicians are doing while they’re playing?

[April Verch:] So, the — I think the answer is that, typically, people don’t think about it enough [laughter] in our traditions. But I will say that when I’m playing for a dancer, a really good dancer, I know they’re listening to me. So I’m trying to, you know, be steady. I’m trying to inspire them a little bit. You know, even if its dynamics, sort of kind of coming down and building it back up by watching them. But I feel like my job is more to be there to allow them to do what they want to do. So I make it interesting enough. But I think a really good dancer is listening more than the musician who’s playing for them. Typically, that’s the sense that I get. I mean, it doesn’t happen enough, in my opinion. But when it happens, and you encounter other dancers and other musicians that are approaching it that way, it’s next level stuff, you know. Really cool. So right now I’m working on a project with a dancer from England and he does Northumbrian clog dancing, which traditionally was done with a wooden clog. And he has a dance legend in his tradition that is from the same era as Donnie Gilchrist. And we’re comparing their lives and careers and dance styles and choreographing a routine that is based on both of them together. And talking to him about this stuff is really fun, because he approaches it the exact same way. I mean, he’s always listening to the tune. He’s always trying to figure out how he can use his feet as an instrument to mimic the melody. And so I’ve been thinking about it extra this last little while as we’re working on this project. And I’m hoping that, you know, our project and others like that will sort of revive that thought and that part of the tradition of how important the feet can be in being another instrument. Where the dancer is just not another showpiece where you bring out the token dancer for the entertainment, you know, it’s part of the band.

[Ryan Bruce:] It definitely seemed that way when you were dancing.

[Howard Spring:] Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

[Ryan Bruce:] I think more music would be great.

[Howard Spring:] Sure [inaudible].

[Cody Walters:] Yeah.

[April Verch:] Yeah, sure. So this is a tune that I wrote a long time ago. And I tried to write it in the old-time Canadian tradition or the Ottawa Valley tradition. We have a lot of two steps and polkas that would be played for social dancing at a dance in between waltzes and square dances. And so I wrote this for some neighbours it’s called Eldon and Ethel. Just going to check my tuning lick. [Music] It’s getting warm in here and the fiddle feels it.

[ Music ]

One, two, three.

[ Music ]

It’s a pretty happy tune. And I think that’s true, generally speaking of old-timey Canadian tunes, like, they’re all very happy sounding, whereas some of the more, you know, the specific regional styles that, you know, have the Scottish lament or the slow air, you know, they might be sad, but yeah, the rest of the Canadian traditions are very uplifting and joyful [laughter].

[Ryan Bruce:] Do you have a lament that you guys can play? An error or lament, one of these other more contrasting tunes? Maybe that could be something to wrap it up.

[Howard Spring:] Yeah.

[April Verch:] Yeah, I can play in a slow air solo.

[Cody Walters:] Yeah.

[April Verch:] Yeah.

[Howard Spring:] Sure.

[April Verch:] Sure.

[Howard Spring:] That’d be great.

[Ryan Bruce:] That would be nice.

[Howard Spring:] That’d be great.

[April Verch:] Log Driver’s Waltz, I don’t know if that’s one I can play because Cody loves that tune.

[Cody Walters:] I do love that tune.

[April Verch:] I don’t know. Look it up. If we can play that, we’ll play it [laughter]. [Music] So, this is called Miss Jamieson’s Favourite. And it’s a slow air from the Celtic tradition. I think I learnt it from a Cape Breton fiddler. But I don’t know. It’s not a traditional Cape Breton tune, it’s older than that, so.

[ Music ]

[Howard Spring:] Gorgeous.

[Ryan Bruce:] Excellent choice