The Devil Came Up
to Cambridge
From a Log24 entry of Friday, December 3, 2004:
“Anything but the void. And so we keep hoping to luck into a winning combination, to tap into a subtle harmony, trying like lock pickers to negotiate a compromise with the ‘mystery tramp,’ as Bob Dylan put it….”
— Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
New York Times, Oct. 26, 2004
From this morning’s New York Times:
|
BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn., Dec. 8 (AP) – Ralph Blizard, a renowned fiddler who began his career playing on the radio, died here on Friday [Dec. 3, 2004], according to a funeral home in Kingsport. He was 85. Mr. Blizard started playing at age 7. He began his career on the radio in In 2002, Mr. Blizard was inducted into the American Fiddlers Hall of Fame…. [He] was a founder of the Traditional Appalachian Music Heritage Association. |
In memory of Mr. Blizard:
| From Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier, 367-368:
They consulted and twisted the pegs again to make the dead man’s tuning, and they then set in playing a piece slightly reminiscent of Bonaparte’s Retreat, which some name General Washington’s tune. This was softer, more meditative, yet nevertheless grim as death. When the minor key drifted in it was like shadows under trees, and the piece called up something of dark woods, lantern light. It was awful old music in one of the ancient modalities, music that sums up a culture and is the true expression of its inner life. Birch said, Jesus wept. The fit’s took them now. None of the Guard had ever heard fiddle and banjo played together in that tuning, nor had they heard playing of such strength and rhythm applied to musical themes so direful and elegiac. Pangle’s use of the thumb on the fifth string and dropping to the second was an especial thing of arrogant wonder. It was like ringing a dinner bell, yet solemn. His other two fingers worked in a mere hard, groping style, but one honed to brutish perfection. Stobrod’s fingers on the fiddle neck found patterns that seemed set firm as the laws of nature. There was a deliberation, a study, to their clamping of the strings that was wholly absent from the reckless bowing of the right hand. What lyric Stobrod sang recounted a dream — his or some fictive speaker’s — said to have been dreamed on a bed of hemlocks and containing a rich vision of lost love, the passage of awful time, a girl wearing a mantle of green. The words without music would have seemed hardly fuller in detail than a telegraphic message, but together they made a complete world. When the song fell closed, Birch said to Teague, Good God, these is holy men. Their mind turns on matters kept secret from the likes of you and me. |