I was chatting with a folk musician friend of mine about the difficulty of finding a tagline to describe our genera of music. I said “people don’t always conjure up the image I want no matter what term I use.” She said she had
recently begun saying she sings “old and new songs about all of us” Which struck me as a very nice way of putting it.

Here at Otter Creek, we work hard in two main directions, mining the traditional music of our country, (and hence a great number of other countries from whence many of this nation’s inhabitants hail) and the creation of new songs. You could call us folk musicians, but when we bust out with something Celtic, old-timey, bluegrassy, klezmerish, or singer-songwritery (or just confusingly genre-bending such as the “chamber influenced acoustic tweeny punkpop” song we just wrote, or the “apocalyptic heavy metal death folk” setting we came up with for a favorite Robert Frost poem) we don’t want anyone to feel betrayed or confused. We’ve tried calling ourselves “Rocky Mountain roots music,” and that’s about as close a description as we’ve been able to find.

I kept my friend’s description of her music in mind and one evening found myself saying that we play “music of the people, by the people, and for the people…” and I realized that was about as true as it gets. We’re dedicated to keeping alive many of the great songs that rose up from the common folk of our nation, and we’re dedicated to writing terrific new songs about our surroundings and the journey we share through life with all of you.

So I’ve found a new way to describe what we’re doing. I hereby declare that Otter Creek is first and foremost dedicated to the proposition that music of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. We’ll do our part to keep people humming and tapping their toes to “Shady Grove” and “Sally Goodin'.” We’ll keep on playing old songs that draw a tear or leave us with a sigh, like “Fare Thee Well, or Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times” We’ll rollick with an old Scottish tune turned into “Jefferson and Liberty” (Thomas Jefferson’s presidential campaign song) or cavort with “Farewell to Ireland” (while inserting a little American funk) and we’ll keep on writing songs about the people we meet on our own journey.

That, for me, is what folk music is about. It resonates deep in our souls, and hopefully, if we’re doing our job right. It will move you as well.

“Stop fiddling with that or you’ll break it!”
“I fiddled around with it enough that I finally got it to work”
        -Kate MacLeod, quoting her father


“Stop fiddling around!” I spent most of my school years in a fog of missed deadlines. I never knew about schedule changes, when my homework was due, or sometimes even what class I was in… I still vividly remember looking up from reading a book and discovering that the kids sitting around me weren’t the ones I had been sitting next to when class started. I must have totally missed a class change! It wasn’t that I didn’t pay attention, it was just that my attention was always drawn to the wrong thing, like a really good book, where I was going hiking after school, or how to construct a robot of myself so life like no one could ever tell if it was me or my robot sitting in that school desk.
 
I was one of those kids whose pockets, if turned out, could have probably filled a small rucksack. I was terrified of being caught with nothing to do (which was pretty much my view of “appropriate” school behavior) and so had enough materials with me, on the sly, to keep my attention occupied precisely where it shouldn’t have been. I still remember the day I realized that all the desks and tables height was adjusted with Alan screws. Most kids my age didn’t even know what an Alan screw was back then, but my dad was quite the tinkerer and I knew just where I could find the tool I wanted. I spent plenty of time working on a look of decided innocence and mild disinterest when puzzled teachers had to reseat classmates whose desks were now to small or too tall, or call the custodian when a table collapsed because the screw on one leg had suddenly given way. I didn’t view myself as a troublemaker, just a very curious student of the world around me. I couldn’t understand why my teachers valued repetition and sitting still more than imagination and movement.

 My interest in music started at the age of four when I saw a performance of a violin concerto on the television at home. My parents traded and bartered to afford the cost of classical training with a family friend who played in the Utah Symphony. There is a VERY specific way to play the violin that has been carefully honed, honored, and cherished over the past 500 years. My instructor initiated me into the world of etudes, exercises, and note reading (with somewhat sporadic success) and I made reasonable if not stellar progress. I was expected to practice a lot. (Often two hours a day or more). As I advanced into more difficult music my teacher prescribed an abacus which I was to use to carefully count the number of times I played a difficult passage
  correctly (often 50 or 100 times were ordered). I found the structure stifling and the repetition mind numbing. My sight reading skills negligible, my attention span crumbling, I often turned to the instrument and simply fiddled around, following my dancing thoughts up and down the fingerboard, growling with anger, or laughing with delight. Luckily I was blessed to have one of those rare teachers who could honor imagination and passion as well as rote learning. She always told me that to play music you had to be like a tiger, you had to take a risk and leap at the prey or you stood no chance at getting what you wanted.
 
I switched to Viola when I was 11. This more introspective instrument was a better fit.  As the “poet-philosopher” of the string family its deeper tone and more dreamy nature spoke to me. Still, I found myself wasting my practice time “fiddling around,” making up tunes, trying out tones. I carried my passion for Viola into college, pursuing a double major of Music Composition and Viola Performance, but, as usual, I got involved in too many things and my graduation languished on the periphery of unfinished projects and an overbooked schedule. My composition teacher eventually forced me to make a choice. He advised me to drop one side of my double major and progress on toward graduation. Agonizing on which side of myself to favor, performance or composition, I finally went with the latter, feeling  it offered more room for my “fiddling around.”
 
From the start it should have been clear I was more of a fiddler than a violinist. Naturally curious, I spent hours exploring the sounds the instrument could make. The fiddle is a remarkable canvas for the imagination. An embodiment of paradox, it can both break and heal the soul. Perhaps that’s why so many folks have been frightened or dismissive of the fiddle, it represents something other than business as usual. It refuses to sit silent, or still. A tool of dreamers and prophets it can both create and destroy. It can set the feet of the righteous dancing down the path to hell, stich up a broken heart, or leave one grasping on the edge of epiphany. It caters to those whose attention wanders the roads less traveled and whose feet march to the rhythm of a music only they can hear. As a musical explorer, the fiddle keeps me on the sharp edge of discovery; exploring new sounds and techniques, diving into the deep waters of tradition, or gathering the strands of a new song out of the immense shimmering firmament of notes. The fiddle can stand the strain due not to its rigidity, but because of its flexibility.  For a long time fiddling was a secret side affair for me, something I did when I should have been doing something else. Now I realize that everything else was just getting in the way of fiddling.

All my life I’ve harbored the not so secret aspiration of being a hobo. It goes right along with my love of the outdoors and trains and travel. I don’t know where I first picked up the desire, but in order to keep my wife, Mary, from pointing her finger at me I’ve given it considerable thought.  I initially assigned blame to the movie “The Journey of Natty Gann” which I saw when I was 12 or 13 (I mean, what’s cooler than riding the rails with a wolf at your side) but more often than not over the years I’ve blamed the banjo. I also blame the banjo for my love of boxcars, beans cooked in a can over a fire under a bridge, and the wild crazy idea I have of running all across the country to play music. There’s something about all those things that just seems to fit with the banjo. 

My introduction to the banjo came before I was born. My father was a folksinger, and although his professional performing days were mostly over before I came along, he often sang for family and friends (or more often just to please himself). Most of his songs he accompanied with the guitar, but when it came to homeless tramping or trains he generally pulled out the banjo. There were just a few of these songs but they seemed so perfectly suited for me. The plucky tone of the banjo, along with my father’s rich baritone spoke to me of letting go of attachments and fear, of letting the wind and the rain and the rails carry me far from home. They taught me of the wistful longing of lost innocence and the sweet lullaby of a long journey, and the wonder of belonging to the wide, wild, flabbergasting world we live in.  

Click to listen to a recording of my father singing “Hobo’s Lullaby”

That was a long time ago. I’ve had plenty of times in my life where I’ve done the opposite, where I tried to hide from my wild wandering self, times of fear and loneliness, denial, and clinging. I’ve fought change till my knuckles were bloody and I was exhausted.  But somehow, when the time came, I’ve always heard the sound of the banjo and the train as a summons to let go and move on.  I started playing the banjo at a time like that, a time where I was hanging on for dear life and at the same time afraid of where that life might take me.

My father wasn’t performing much anymore so he loaned me his banjo for a while when I said I wanted to learn. When I came back playing tunes he’d never heard before, he generously told me that since I could play it better than he could, maybe I better keep it. Doc Watson once told an interviewer that his first real instrument was a banjo his father made for him. Doc said “one day he brought it to me and put it in my hands and said, son, I want you to learn to play this thing real well… it might help you get through the world.” In a very real way, my dad did the same for me.

Over the years, I’ve generally kept the Banjo to myself more than my other instruments, I get it out when I’m feeling the wistful pull of the road, or when I’m feeling a little stuck, or need to connect with the wild untamed being I am inside. Recently I began teaching a beginning banjo class for the University of Utah. Although I’ve taught before, I was really struck while preparing lessons just how deep down the banjo was in my soul. I teased the members of the class that they should enter the novice division of the State Banjo Championship, and they in turn challenged me to enter the open division. It was something I’d never really considered too deeply before. I finally decided to give it a go. Knowing that my old-timey clawhammer pieces might not be quite what the judges were looking for I didn’t expect to win, but Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson had just died, and in some way, this was my way of letting them go. They are both on that last train over the River Jordan, and I guess, in that way all of us are just hobos passing through.

We’ve been working on arranging songs for our second album, and have been repeatedly drawn to the key of A (pretty low in my voice), viola, long neck banjo, and astonishingly low tunings on the guitar. It occurred to me that perhaps we were birthing a new sound… a “low lonesome sound.” I’ve made my share of lonesome sounds in my life. Many of them have been in the “High Lonesome” bluegrass style, singing and playing songs that sprang out of the soil long ago, but this seemed like something new.

At the Celtic Festival in Evanston last month I was reminded of the lonesome sound that happened the first time I played the Scottish Bagpipes. Several years back my in-laws came home from a trip abroad with a set, and presented them with great expectation to Mary and her five brothers. We were instructed that they were for sharing but that whoever showed the most promise could have a go at learning them first. There was no shortage of enthusiasm, and three of Mary’s brother’s rushed off to the other room to assemble the pipes. Moments later they came marching into the room accompanied by a sound I can only describe as a flock of geese dying of pneumonia while attempting to escape from a butcher.

With my musical training I felt certain I could do a little better. So after an excruciating half hour during which everyone tried to offer advice (which of necessity was done very loudly as at least one or two of the brothers at a time were always having a go at the pipes), I finally suggested maybe I should have a try. After all, I’m not bad with a penny whistle and how different could it be? Besides, with my hearing loss I had always imagined I would take up the pipes when I could no longer hear well enough to sing.

So I set to it. It seemed clear to me that one of the problem they were having was that they weren’t getting the chanter going and that perhaps the drone pipes were a bit out of tune. After 15 minutes or so of adjustments I felt I was ready to give it a go. I filled the bladder with air, squeezed, and…

Well, let’s just say it was a lonesome sound. Not one that anyone stayed around to listen to, although everyone was laughing hard enough it was difficult for them to leave. Later in the day an acquaintance who played pipes came by the house and we had him look at what we felt was clearly a defective instrument that my in-laws had been bilked into buying by some unscrupulous Scotsman.  He picked the pipes up, made a couple of adjustments and burst into a glorious refrain of “Scotland the Brave”. All of us clamored for an explanation of why it hadn’t worked for us. He just winked and said “Maybe you just aren’t Scotch enough”.  He left us with his card in case we wanted some lessons.

Several bottles of Scotch later we still hadn’t solved the mystery. The Pipes didn’t sound too bad after he had adjusted them, but none of us had the strength to blow, squeeze and play at the same time. Finally we decided he was right, none of us had enough Scottish blood. However, we reasoned that as all of us had some Scottish ancestry, maybe if we all tried at once we’d be equal to the task. Jobs were assigned and I managed to get the job of fingering the chanter as I was the only one with experience playing a tube with holes. One of us was in charge of blowing, another in charge of squeezing, and the last person just stood by shouting out helpful advice and encouragement. Finally we were able to launch into a halting but reasonably passable rendition of “Scotland the Brave”. Marching proved complicated however, with three of us attached to the pipes at various heights and with varying levels of force. We were finally forced to stop when the breathing tube was jammed up a nostril and we all tripped over each other landing in a heap. That was a “low lonesome sound” indeed.

Other low lonesome sounds in my repertoire include the rumblings of gastrointestinal distress (sure to clear a room in a jiffy) and the sound of me attempting Tuvan throat singing (also a crowd repellent).  One lonesome sound I’ve left behind is snoring (this is such a lonesome sound that had me banned to the living room at times). Apparently losing a little weight was enough to clear that one up and I’ve been less lonely since.

There’s no need to fear, the only lonesome sounds you’ll hear at our upcoming concerts are the folk and blues inspired low lonesome songs of people far from their homes and safety. We’ll steer clear of the rest. Hope to see you in the audience. Be sure to say hello! We may play a lonesome song now and then but we love the company of music lovers!


-Peter is a very poor piper, and pecks of pepper make him sneeze, but has done himself proud in the pickin' and singing world. Come see Otter Creek do their thing April 21 at the 9th and 9th concert series in Salt Lake. Full details available on the calendar tab.