Janie Rothfield Transcript
Leah Roseman:
The incredibly charming American musician, Janie Rothfield, is a great traditional fiddler, banjo player, educator, composer, and so much fun to talk to. She shared several of her original tunes on both violin and banjo, and we talked about teaching music, accompanying dancers, creativity, and the importance of making connections through music. Janie has created a unique series of weekend workshops called "Janie's Jumpstart Camps", and she records and tours with many different bands.
Her website is linked in the description. I've included timestamps as well, and this conversation, along with all the episodes, is available in podcast format on your favorite podcast player, as well as video. The transcript will be published to my blog, and everything is linked on my website in the description. Hey, Janie Rothfield, thanks so much for joining me.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, I'm so happy to see you. I'm just excited to have a chat.
Leah Roseman:
I should have checked. I know you're known as Jane and Janie. What do you prefer?
Janie Rothfield:
Janie's fine. In 2014, I inaugurated my "Janie's Jumpstart Weekend Music Camp". Yeah, I started... Some people have always called me Janie, some people call me Jane, so Janie's good. Will be Janie today.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Since it's your website, it might help to-
Janie Rothfield:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, janierothfield.com.
Janie Rothfield:
Yep.
Leah Roseman:
I'm so glad you agreed to play for us. You're an acoustic roots musician, you play a lot of old-time music and different styles, and both violin, banjo, and you also play some guitar and sing.
Janie Rothfield:
Yep.
Leah Roseman:
I see you're holding your fiddle.
Janie Rothfield:
Yep.
Leah Roseman:
If you want to start with a tune, that would be awesome, if you're thinking of something.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, okay. Sure. Let's see. Well, how about if we start off with one of my favorite traditional tunes I've been playing lately. I moved down to Virginia from Philadelphia, and before that, up in Albany, New York, and before that, Scotland. We've been moving south, and I've had a chance to get exposed to a lot more musicians and different styles of fiddling.
I really like the fiddling of Uncle Norm Edmonds from Hillsville, Virginia. He was a classic Galax-style fiddler, and this is one of the tunes that just spoke to me when I first heard it. It's called New Jordan. I'm going to play it a little bit fast and in the style. I hope you enjoy it. Let's see.
Leah Roseman:
Awesome. Thank you so much.
Janie Rothfield:
Thank you. I pretended like I was playing at one of the Fiddlers' Conventions for that one.
Leah Roseman:
In what way?
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, just putting it out there, having fun. Thinking there was a bunch of people clogging in the distance, just-
Leah Roseman:
I was going to ask about that, because you play for a lot of dancers, a lot of Contra dancers.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Yep. A lot of Contra dancers. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
I couldn't keep my feet still while you were playing that.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, well, then, perfect. Then I won.
Leah Roseman:
Such a great rhythmic drive to your playing. I've listened to tons of your recordings, of course, to prepare for this. I'm curious about rhythmic variety, because you always have such a cool groove and what seems to be simple music, in some ways, you make it, I don't know, so interesting.
Janie Rothfield:
Well, I appreciate that you noticed that, because I used to say that I had a terrible attention span, and so I couldn't repeat things over and over and over again. But I think, as an artist, I've realized over the many, many years that I've been playing music, that I'm a creative person, and I like to create things with my music. I'm not a good replicator.
I can, but I've always liked to take a little musical journey, push the envelope a little bit, but always staying true to what the original feel of the tune is or the melody is. Going out on a limb, maybe sawing it off a little bit, but always coming back. I think that that has to do with just from when I first started playing violin as a little child in Suzuki method where it was all about the rhythms and the different bowing patterns.
Then starting to play fiddle music in Connecticut, and hearing old musicians from Quebec, Leo Beaudoin from Canton... Collinsville, Connecticut, actually. I used to follow him and his wife around at the Fiddlers' Convention. It's been a long time in there. But I do like to have my way with tunes as much as I can.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. You mentioned your Suzuki start. I looked up your teacher, Louise Behrend, and I found an article where she was interviewed at the end of her life, she was in her late 90s, and there was a quote I thought you'd appreciate.
Janie Rothfield:
Ooh.
Leah Roseman:
I'll just read this directly.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh yes, please.
Leah Roseman:
She said, "The fiddle still comes out of the case every day. If it doesn't, it looks at me like, 'Why?' An instrument has to be kept alive by playing."
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, wow. That's amazing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I know. It was a great quote. I understand you also played for Mr. Suzuki himself when he came to the States.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. I think I went to two conferences or something. There's two pictures of me at two different ages. We went up there and we played for him, and I remember I was quite young. I've got a picture of myself over there, I think I was like maybe seven or something. I'm holding my fiddle like this. All I remember him doing... He didn't speak any English, but I just remember him going like this and taking my nose and pushing it this way, because I was probably looking around and saying hello to my parents or something, or playing for the crowd like I do.
Then I played with a bunch of other young people as well. There was another gal that was the young kid, me and Marci Chasnow, who found me about six years ago. She and her husband... He was a Suzuki player, and they both play trad-style fiddle music as well. We were really excited to meet up, and we were reminiscing about... We used to go into New York to Ms. Behrend's apartment with all of her other students and the big kids, they were probably 13 or something.
Marci and I would get up there, we would do our Twinkle, Twinkle with our variations, and they would all play along. It was just fiddle environment. Segueing into that style of music was fairly natural for me.
Leah Roseman:
Although, Mr. Suzuki, the fact that he wanted you to have a certain posture, I mean, it's so rigid, right? A lot of people still insist that people look down their fingerboard or...
Janie Rothfield:
Well, I think that... I always tell my students not to look now.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I do too.
Janie Rothfield:
Because I think it engages something different in the brain. But I think having that nice... I mean, it's rigid but it's also relaxed, because everything is kind of... You're not like this, you're not like this, you're not like this. It's just... Yeah, I guess I never got so far that I got yelled at for not having the proper posture or anything.
Leah Roseman:
I noticed-
Janie Rothfield:
I don't think Ms. Behrend yelled at anybody actually.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It was interesting how she got into that like it was saying, because she wanted to start when she was very young, and they said, "You're too young." There are other details. I can send you that article later. It was kind of interesting.
Janie Rothfield:
I'd love to see it, yeah. I remember I tried finding her about 10 years ago, looked her up, and I think I tried... I even called the Suzuki Institute, I think, and I asked them for her email or phone number, and they didn't want to share her personal information with somebody. One of my big regrets is that... And maybe she knew about me, that she never saw what she created, you know?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
I'm thankful. So thankful.
Leah Roseman:
In terms of teaching, I'm curious. You mentioned the Janie's Jumpstart, and I found that very interesting, because you started this quite a few years ago in people's homes, these weekend workshops or camps.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Well, here's the story. I've been doing a lot of teaching, and I love teaching, and I was thinking that I wanted to have my own camp. It came as a result of seeing that there were not many women on staff at the old-time genre music camps. The Celtic music was a little bit more diverse, but... I started looking at the ratios of men instructors to women, and it was terrible, like two to 24.
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
Janie Rothfield:
It was bad. I said, "Well, I'm going to start my own camp, and I'm going to only have women instructors to start." Then it took a few years before my friends, Pete Peterson and Kellie Allen in Oxford, PA, who are wonderful old-time musicians, said, "Why don't you have it at our house?" I said, "Great." The idea was to have small, small classes, very focusing on technique and creativity and artistry, and not learning all the tunes, but how to play them better, internalize the music, and things like that.
Plus, it was really fun, and we had great food and people just had a great time. That's been going on since 2014. I have since invited a few of the men musician teachers to come and play. I'm not excluding the guys. It's been great, because a lot of the women who hadn't taught at camps, now they've got on the radar, and there's a lot more of us out there teaching. Yeah, it's been really fun.
I've done them in lots of different places and different countries, and it's always exciting. The pandemic stopped things a little bit. I did some online things and then this last spring, I had two in-person ones, and we did not have any illness as a result of that. So I was very happy with all the precautions, and so great to see everybody.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting. I listened to all these episodes you've done with Cameron DeWhitt, and it was over pre-pandemic, and then during the pandemic, and just seeing how you'd pivoted, because you always seemed to have this incredible energy to organize and always play with people and teach. You just seamlessly seem to like, "Oh, we're going online. We're doing stuff outside." Still the same energy, but it must have been hard.
Janie Rothfield:
It was hard. Well, the first thing was, of course, figuring out the internet, and who knew what upload speed was, you know?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
I was like, "Oh." It was a disaster to start. I was starting to panic, and then we went to our internet provider and got that figured out. Then we figured out we didn't need to set up microphones. I just have this little Samson mic. I'll show it to you guys. It's like $49. I use it in all my stuff that I do online, and get it set up so the background looks good. Yeah, just keep going and try and keep it organized, and let people know, and share the music.
We had a jam every Wednesday for maybe a year and a half or something with Bill Wellington who we put a band together during the pandemic. Then, this winter, I had some other things going on, and we stopped and I know everybody's missing everybody. We'll try and do it again sometime soon.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I heard you just say that you'd done online Contra dancing. People were dancing in their kitchens independently.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
That's amazing.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. The Contra dance community figured out a way to do this, and there's some technology. Some of the young people who were involved with it figured out where we'd have a remote caller, and we'd come in and we'd play, and they'd figure out somehow to sync it. We would not play to what the caller was saying, and we would not look at the dancers, because it wasn't-
Leah Roseman:
In sync.
Janie Rothfield:
... in sync. We just played, and we knew how many times, and she'd hold up a sign saying, "Two more." It was fun.
Leah Roseman:
There's an old tradition that fiddlers would be actually dance callers. Have you ever done that yourself?
Janie Rothfield:
Not really officially. I can actually play and call something for people to do. In the back of my mind, I've always thought, "Oh, I should go take a class and a course and be a caller, because it's kind of fun." But I've never really done it officially. Maybe at a wedding or something. "Circle left. Swing your partner. Do-si-do." It's fun. I like it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It's interesting. It seems like there's this incredible community in the roots acoustic music, like just all these festivals and adults just at camp learning.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. It seems like in the last... I didn't grow up with camps or being able to... The way I learned was just by going to festivals or fiddle contests, and getting together with people, and having jams, and we all just played together and listened to the records. There was no video. It was a lot of written music out there. I probably can count on this hand how many tunes I've learned from written music. Although I do make up tunes, other people usually end up writing them out for me.
Yeah. It's an amazing thing out there, resources online, and in-person camps, and the internet, and online. It's a plethora of opportunities for people. I think it's really important for people to learn from people. There's a lot of folks that come to the camps who've never played with anybody before, and they're so excited. They're a little nervous. They're like, "Oh, I don't know if I can do this."
Of course they're fine and it's just... I find it to be a lot of fun to meet people and play with people, and see what we can do, make some creative music together, you know?
Leah Roseman:
You have a strong family connection with music in that your husband, Allan Carr, you've been playing with for many years, and also your daughter.
Janie Rothfield:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Shona.
Janie Rothfield:
Yep, Shona. Yep. Shona Carr.
Leah Roseman:
I was curious, so when you met Allan, you were in your junior year at college, and you were studying public health policy. Was that right, or?
Janie Rothfield:
Well, actually I was doing a degree... I ended up getting my degree in political studies with a minor in dance because I could get all my college credit to graduate from the dance classes that I took, and I just couldn't deal with more than three academic classes at a time. When I went to Scotland for my junior year abroad, it was just one of these courses where I could take classes at the college with the other students, as opposed to just being in with the Americans.
That was very rigorous. It was a very different learning situation from what I had been at. I went to Pitzer College in Claremont, California, which was very... It really suited me as a Suzuki kid. It was more broad view as opposed to just slamming out the facts, which I was never particularly good at. I found I was pretty good at the worldview things, and I had some great teachers. The dance teachers I had were really amazing.
I do credit some of my ability to teach from those experiences, although I'm not sure I could... Well, actually, I did figure skating when I was a teen, and I had an amazing coach. I was an ice dancer, and I had a partner, Johnny Sjoberg, and we were 10 and 11, 12, 13-year-olds. I remember it was all about the music and the feel, and not just bending your knee, but digging into the ice, and all these subtle things that I use when I'm teaching.
The difference between just pulling your bow and making the sound and making tone, all those kinds of really subtle things. You put your foot out for skating, and you don't just put it out, you put it out and there's maybe a little bend, or if you're dancing and you're going to put your arm out, it's just not like this. It's moves. There's other stuff going on. Anyway, make a long story short, I realize I use a lot of that kind of thing when I'm teaching.
Leah Roseman:
That's very interesting. I'm curious, how did you balance things as a teenager? Because that's a huge commitment of time, to do dance and figure skating.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, I missed a lot of school in junior high school. Yeah. I think I missed all the classes about grammar, because when I got to ninth grade in Spanish, I had no idea. I didn't know what a verb or a noun or any of that stuff was. Yeah. I did miss a lot of school. I guess I balanced it, because I did graduate and then I got a college degree.
Leah Roseman:
Your parents must have been so supportive of... Because they-
Janie Rothfield:
They were very supportive, yep. Mom was a very busy rheumatology doctor, and my dad was a scientist. I lived walking distance to the skating rink, so that helped. Yeah. They made it work. What can I say? Thank you, Mom and Dad.
Leah Roseman:
You've been a touring musician for so long. How did that work when you had a young child?
Janie Rothfield:
Well, Al and I spent our 20s, the '80s, playing professionally. We lived in Scotland for most of the '80s and made three recordings and toured all over the UK. We never really did much in Europe, but we did every folk club in the United Kingdom. We also toured in America, which was amazing. Then I burnt out doing all the bookings and things at the end of the '80s, and we moved back to the States and got jobs.
We didn't really do a lot of touring, but we started playing for a lot of dancers, local dancers and going to local festivals, so the kids got used to going to those. They grew up with a bunch of the other young kids of our friends. It was a community effort. I do remember, though, at the Dance Flurry Festival, which is up in Albany, New York, started in 1990, I think. I was there with Shona, who she was four months old.
I was staying there and all of a sudden I realized, "I have to go play." We were talking to this guy, and I said, "Shona's sleeping. Here's her bag. She's really easy. If she wakes up, just give her a bottle. She's a really good baby." I gave my child to this person we'd been talking to, and he says, "Jane, you're handing me your child." I said, "Oh yeah, I guess I am." He says, "Do you know who I am?" I said, "No."
He says, "I'm Michael Miller." Who is married to Valerie Mendel, who was in the old-time string band with my sister in the early '70s. It's like full circle kind of stuff like that. Yeah, a lot of help. We used to go to festivals and we would bring my friend, Lane Braden, who lives in Ottawa, who's a fiddler. We'd bring her down from Ottawa and get her a ticket, and she'd look after the kids while we were playing. We figured it out. We didn't lose anybody.
Leah Roseman:
The duo with your daughter's called Little Missy, right?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You have such funny names for a lot of your... So many bands, so many collaborations and albums.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I love the whimsy... It's just funny, there's an in-joke in my family with Little Missy. We started calling... Like when you have a GPS telling you where to go, it was before we even had an iPhone. I think we rented one when we were in France, and it was in French, and she was very bossy, and she kept taking us on these routes that did not make any sense. We started calling her Little Missy, because she was very bossy. It was just a-
Janie Rothfield:
Well, my dad used to call me Missy. I don't know why Little Missy came up. I mean, she's tall, I'm little, so maybe that was it. Yeah. Finding a band name sometimes it can be really hard.
Leah Roseman:
Hen's Teeth, your duo.
Janie Rothfield:
Yep. Hen's Teeth. Well, Allan always wanted to name a band Hen's Teeth because there's an expression in the UK, which I had never heard before as rare as hen's teeth. Nathan and I needed a name and so we just decided to do that. It seemed to be fun.
Leah Roseman:
I really enjoy your album Off the Cuff. What is it? Off-
Janie Rothfield:
Off the Cuff and On the Fly.
Leah Roseman:
On the Fly. Yeah. It's interesting because he's a cellist and banjo player and fiddler and you both sing. It's wonderful all the different combinations you come up with.
Janie Rothfield:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
With him, you formed The Idumea string quartet, right?
Janie Rothfield:
Yes. Yeah. Nathan Bontrager is a wonderful young cello player, banjo, fiddle, guitar, singer. I mean, amazing musician, a classical musician of great repute. He lives in Cologne, Germany where he went to do his masters in Baroque music.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, yeah. He plays gamba too, right?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. He plays a viola da gamba. You heard him talk about that on the Get Up in the Cool. We met each other at Clifftop and we played a bunch together. I remember... I think it was the summer of 2015 or something. We found ourselves playing without anybody else. He said, "Janie, play that tune of yours that you wrote that I love." I don't remember which one it was. We played it and I looked at him and said, "Dang, that's good. We should do some gigs together or something."
I'm always doing that. He said, "Well, I live in Germany." I said, "Well, I'll come over." We put together these little tours and we took buses and did it real cheap and walked a lot with instruments. Then I think it was the second time we were over there. We were in London and he got a friend of his who does recording to set it up after this coffee shop had closed.
We went there from 8:00 to midnight and just laid down this recording with minimal rehearsal. It's kind of cool. It's a kind of cool recording. I think it's available on Bandcamp. I have like two copies left of my own.
Leah Roseman:
You mean Hen's Teeth, the duo?
Janie Rothfield:
Hen's Teeth. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I bought it on Bandcamp. Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, you did? Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. There are some pretty interesting stuff in there. We had started really pushing the boundaries of our music and more improvy things and just throwing it out there. Then we were playing a few years later somewhere in England and Ewan McDonald who plays in another band with Nathan, who is a Scottish guy who plays great Scottish and Celtic music, but also loves old-time American, old-time.
Becka Wolfe, who was a violist who graduated... I think she was the first class that graduated from Newcastle University traditional music degree up in England. They were down there and they came and showed up at this little pub gig that we were doing. We had them come and play something. We had never played together and it just went whoosh. We looked at each other went, "Whoa, that was really cool."
So we spent the next couple of years when I would come over and do some gigs and we rehearse madly for two or three days and then we made a recording in... I've lost track, 2019, maybe I think it was.
Leah Roseman:
'19. Yeah. I bought it on Bandcamp as well.
Janie Rothfield:
Okay. There you go. It was one of these epic kind of things where we got a record label to do it. Penny Fiddle Records. A guy they know, brought his mics and his computer. We went to this farmhouse from an uncle of... I think Becka's uncle or something. It was like the Rolling Stones or something like that. I mean, this big room with these pictures of these old people from the 1500s and lairds and lords and ladies and stuff.
We threw this CD together and it's really out there. It's so exciting. Of course, it came out in March of 2020, but we do have plans to get together in November of this year so we're kind of excited about that.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I love, love that album.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, thank you.
Leah Roseman:
Many of your beautiful original tunes, but some of the old... Like Silver Dagger, that rendition is so touching.
Janie Rothfield:
Amazing. Yeah. Becka's an incredible vocalist.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. To sing while playing the viola too, it's just kind of amazing to me.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, yeah. If you-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. I think everything on that was live except for a couple of harmony overdubs on that. Yeah. Actually Nathan and Ewan I'm going to see them, oh, this month in a few weeks. They're going to be coming to the Clifftop Appalachian music festival. That'll be a nice reunion. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
When you met your husband Allan, he played a tune. I think the story it's like Amelia Earhart.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. In Search of Amelia Earhart.
Leah Roseman:
You had been thinking about that tune, then you heard him play it. It was one of those moments.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. I went to my junior year at college and the first week there was a folk music concert, so of course I went. I brought my fiddle with me and Allan had been traveling and visiting some friends and musicians in New Jersey in Pennsylvania that he had met in Scotland, some Americans. He had been in America that summer and came back, he was wearing overalls.
He was accompanying a friend, Kenny Hadden on the flute, and Kenny's brother Martin was in the trio that we had had, Hadden, Rothfield and Carr, in the 80s. We made some epic recordings with that trio, if I don't mind saying so. Anyway, he's playing the guitar then he says, "Oh, I'm going to sing a bluegrass song I learned while I was in America." I just thought of that song and that's a song that he's sang. I went and talked to him afterwards and the rest was history.
Leah Roseman:
We talked a little bit about your teaching and I really would like to dig into that because I'm a violin teacher and of course you play with such ease. I'm curious how you convey that. Of course, you teach different instruments, but with your violin students.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Well, I do a lot of body movement and vocalization to internalize the way you're supposed to sound on here because there's technique, there's ways to play. You got to put your fingers down, you got to know how to move your bow, but the music has got to come from in here and in here. For me, it's not just notes on a page. Really, the thing that I do with everything that I'm teaching is I have people sing the tune as they would like to play it, especially with the rhythms.
If they can do that, then I find... That'll come out better on their music. Instead of playing like... Those are just the notes, right? If we're going to put rhythm into it, if you can sing it like... and use all the different tone and phrasing and volume and all the different things that you can do, it's going to come out better on the instrument. I guess that's kind of my method.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. I mean, you work with a lot of adults who haven't played as children maybe, or didn't get lessons. Do you find they're extra stiff?
Janie Rothfield:
This is going to sound very... I have magic teaching powers. I just start them and I get them at ease and I don't let them think too much. I just say, "Okay. Put this up here." We get this. Okay. Just kind of relax. Okay. I show them how to hold the bow. Then sometimes I'll say, "Okay. Show me how to hold the bow." I'll have them manipulate my fingers so that they are teaching it back to me. I do that a lot, and relax and breathe and just try and pull the bow and show that it's not as hard as they think it's going to be.
Because I think we all get in our way and just do it bit by bit. Take it slow, but not too slow. Introduce putting the fingers down. For the fiddle, I think that if you're in the right position in your left hand, you put your finger down, you're going to be playing in tune. Usually it's something wrong position-wise that's going to make you not play in tune. You may slide back here. People tend to slide up here. Being... What's the word?
Just in the base camp, in a good place, because if you're holding it this way, when you put your fingers down, it's probably going to be in the right place. Then there's all that repetition, the body. What's it called? The muscle memory.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Are there certain tunes you always start people on or just whatever that you fancy?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. It actually starts... I'm trying to think what I... Yeah. Sometimes the tunes do change. Usually Angelina Baker or Walking Up Georgia Row, a D tune, or a little... Like Sail Away Ladies. Something simple. We can take a fiddle melody and break it down. I don't want to say dumb it down, but break it down to very few notes. If you have a tune like Sail Away Ladies, which goes... The basic melody is... So once they do that, it's not too hard.
Then you start adding a little bit of rhythm. The idea is that... And this is... I'm sure other people do this, but I find I get a lot of people coming to me where they've learned all the notes and then they try and get the bow to attach to the fingers. My way is the fingers are attaching to the bow, which means once you get this bow going on automatic pilot, and I haven't added any fingers in there, I'm just playing basic melody.
That's a little bit more unusual for folks. I really have a very strong... I guarantee people that if they can do that kind of thing and get the bow where it's on automatic pilot, then you're not worried about what's going on here. Your fingers can just do their thing and they'll attach. Then they may... I don't have a description for that, but basically the finger's attached to the bow, the bow's not playing to the fingers.
Leah Roseman:
Right. The rhythm leads.
Janie Rothfield:
Rhythm leads.
Leah Roseman:
The bow's like our breath.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah, the rhythm leads. I'm going to write that down. I like that. The rhythm leads.
Leah Roseman:
In old-time music, there's a lot of Scottish and Irish roots to that. When you were in Scotland, did you learn new tunes or new ways of playing?
Janie Rothfield:
Well, actually just to make... This is something that we've all been learning more in the last few years is that the old-time music really comes... A lot of the people who came from the old world ended up being in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky and up in Quebec, up in New England and things like that. But the banjo and the influence from the enslaved people who were brought here against their will from Africa, that's the wellspring for the rhythms.
There's a lot of tunes actually that sometimes we'll be playing and Allan goes, "Oh, that's a Scottish song." He'll sing the Scottish song of an old-time tune. But to answer your question, I went to Scotland not to learn Scottish music. Although I had played some Celtic music and Irish music and things like that, but I wasn't really there for it.
We went to a lot of sessions and when I played with Allan and Martin, eventually, we really blended the two things together. My sensibility from old-time music would go into some of the Scottish songs and the arrangements. Then vice versa. This Celtic sensibility would come into some of the old time melodies that we were playing. Now there's a lot of people all over the world who are playing old-time music because we've all been traveling and teaching and doing these camps.
They're everywhere, and online a lot of the Europeans and people from all over the world, Australia, they show up at Clifftop and all these different festivals. It's really a small world now.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was looking at Clifftop and it was saying there was over 20 countries' represented of attendees and-
Janie Rothfield:
I wouldn't doubt that at all.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was curious, you have played this festival in Wales. It sounds like a lot of fun, Fire in the Mountain I think?
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, Fire in the Mountain. Yeah, I really want to go back to there. That was an amazing experience because the people who run it play a lot of old-time music and Celtic music. They put this thing together where there's world music, there was blues, there was jazz, rock and roll, Celtic, old-time, singer/songwriters. Music went on all night till 7:00 in the morning.
I mean, and people were dancing and it takes place in this farm, so the main stage is in the middle of a farm courtyard surrounded by stone barns and stuff like that. It's not like thousands and thousands of people like some of the bigger festivals that you might see. It's kind of small, but very, very incredible. Fire in the Mountain. It takes place I think like the last weekend in May. If you can go there, just be prepared to lose your mind. Fun.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, so what was I going to ask you? I wanted to ask you about memorizing tunes because you must have such a library of tunes in there. Is it-
Janie Rothfield:
Oh yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Do you know the words to a lot of them? Does that help or how do you keep them straight?
Janie Rothfield:
Ah, well, I find that I remember a lot of tunes, but then I have my phone and some people are really organized with their phones and their iPads and iPods where they have all the source recordings. I've never gotten around to doing that. But I do have a lot of tunes on my phone from sessions and people that I've played with and so I just go back... I just did this last week, I just went, "Oh, what is that G tune?" I listen, oh. If I hear a couple of notes, then I can remember how it goes.
Yeah. It's repetition and hoping that the person that you're playing with, if you can't remember how to start it, that they will. We all rely on one another to do that. As we get older, it's a little harder to recall all the tunes. I have some friends who are like tune hounds. That's a expression I heard a number of years ago where they learn a ton of tunes and they're constantly learning lots of tunes.
That's not to say that I don't, but I have other things that I'm doing that take up my musical space, like The Idumea Quartet stuff and the bands that I'm in and the teaching and things like that. I always think, "Oh, I'm going to learn this tune and that tune." Sometimes I do, but it's really a matter of just listening over and over again. I was teaching somebody a couple of months ago and was listening to... I had a CD. I think it was Melvin Wine.
I said, "Let's learn a tune from his CD." He said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah, let's learn this tune together." We went through the process where we listened to it, listened to it. We sang the tune, we sang along and then we did it phrase by phrase, we stopped. We rewound, we listened, we missed that note. Where does it go? Does the tune go up? Does it go down? Oh, listen, hear that little rhythm thing. What's going on there?
It's really like training. This is what I do with my students, is really training your ears to hear these little things that can just go by, but don't worry if you miss them because it's fun, right?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Could-
Janie Rothfield:
Hopefully.
Leah Roseman:
I'm a classical violinist, so I'm fascinated with the ornamentation that you use. Could you show us a couple of different versions of how you play a simple tune and add different things in?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah, let's see. Let's see. I'm in D. Oh, I know what I'll do. I'm going to go to cross A.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, I was going to ask you about this. She's tuning her violin.
Janie Rothfield:
Yep. I'm tuning my fiddle to what's called cross A and I'm tuning my G string up to A and my D string up to E. I have AE, AE, which means I can play two octaves with the same fingering, which is nice. It also gives a nice drone-y things. This is a tune... Actually, I just discovered myself playing this tune on the banjo for something, and true to my own form I start out slowly playing it simply, and then I develop the tune and added different things.
I'll sort of show you on this tune, because it's quite a simple tune. It's called Candy Girl from Uncle Bunt Stephens. The melody is pretty simple. Just repeats it. Right? Then I'll do a little rhythmic thing. I'll go... Or I can go... to sort of put a little swingy. It's all in the bow, same finger, right? There's a little technique. It's sort of called rocking the bow. I'm always trying to emulate the offbeat somehow. You can use all sorts of different things to keep that beat going.
Sometimes Nathan who plays with me with Hen's Teeth and Idumea Quartet, he had a great metaphor for finding a rhythm and a tune. I think this is true for any style of music I think. There's this carousel that's going around, right? The carousel horses are always... There's this beat and you can jump on the carousel and you can jump off the carousel.
You don't always have to be playing incessantly that beat, but it has to be internalized, so you can go away and then come back. I think that when you have that kind of approach to it, it means that you can take these different techniques and put them in different orders and play around with them, leaving space. It's not so much about what's happening in the melody for that example, does that make sense?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It makes a lot of sense.
Janie Rothfield:
Okay. Can't wait to teach you a tune.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, was that part of the plan?
Janie Rothfield:
No, not necessarily.
Leah Roseman:
Maybe not today.
Janie Rothfield:
But I'm throwing it out there at some point in time.
Leah Roseman:
Maybe not in front of my podcast audience. I don't know.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Well, maybe... Yeah. I think-
Leah Roseman:
I'm just so glued to the page. I've been trying to get myself unglued through improvisation and trying different things, but playing by ear is not easy for me.
Janie Rothfield:
Well, you know what the fast track is? Just to sing the dang tune, use your voice. Your voice will tell you everything to do. That'll get you out of this, whatever you do here, and it'll get out of the brain that's thinking, organizing stuff. Most classical musicians that I've taught, they say the same thing and they're great. They have no problem learning a tune by ear.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I think-
Janie Rothfield:
I see.
Leah Roseman:
I've never done it with a person. I've tried with recording sometimes, but it's like you say, I think you have to know the form a little bit too, if you know that there's a sort of form and then... I don't know.
Janie Rothfield:
I think it's really just a little bit of bowing technique. That'll give you the accent that you're looking for.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
It really is.
Leah Roseman:
Is that the shuffle that you do and there's the ghosting with the... Like-
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. There's ghosting. I hate to say shuffle. I don't like putting names to things because I think it kind of... I'm more about what does it sound like? The dah-dah-dittin-dah-dah-dittin dah-dah-dittin-dah-day-dittin dit-In-dit-In-daydle-dee day-din deettle-day... Just have it be onomatopoeic I guess, sort of. Because I think that if you can... It gets too... I'll tell you this story. I might have told this before on one of Cameron's podcast things, but I had the opportunity to meet and play music with a couple of wonderful Kentucky musicians.
They've both since passed. Jimmy McConn, who I got to record a whole bunch of stuff with me on my I Fiddle the Banjo CD, epic bluegrass and old-time musician singer, and a generation ahead of him was Paul David Smith. Then a generation of Paul David was Owen 'Snake' Chapman, who was a revered traditional Kentucky fiddler and tune-maker. He made up a lot of tunes too. I should play you one of his tunes.
I asked Paul once about bowing patterns and things, because I was finding that there's a certain subset of people who really need to know exactly what's going on and I'm just not like that, so I don't teach that way. There are fiddlers, wonderful fiddlers who too teach a very specific way to bow a tune, which they've learned from an old recording. They say, "This is how so-and-so bowed this tune." I respect that. It's not what I can do.
I asked Paul David about it and he never took a fiddle class in his life. He just played. He says, "Well, Jane, the bow either goes up or it goes down." Which is true. The bow may go up, it may go down, but the rhythm is always going to be there. That's why I think that if you use your voice to emulate what you're trying to play on, whatever instrument it is that you're doing, it will tell your right hand what to do. I believe that. I teach that. It works. It's amazing, if I can get people to do it, it's-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It's interesting what you're saying about the African influence. When I interviewed Julie Lyonn Lieberman on this podcast, we talked about the blues violin fiddlers who were slaves and her research into that. They were taught violin so they would play for the dancers and the blues came out of that. I guess also this style, like I can imagine the dancers basically Contra dancers, which would've been that style of dancing that they would've been doing in that region. I don't know.
Janie Rothfield:
In the American South?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh yeah. I'm not an academic, so Julie, she knows more about that stuff but from what I've learned the banjo it's a drum, it's a rhythm instrument. There's been a lot of research and Béla Fleck and other folks going to different countries in Africa.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I saw his movie. That was amazing.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Finding these amazing musicians. I mean, traditional music is music of the people and dancing was always part of expression of culture. It would make sense that there would be body movement that goes along with the tunes that we play. That's why I think-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was just thinking, Jane, about those types of rhythms. It's different than Irish fiddling or Scottish fiddling. It is distinctive to American fiddling. That's what I was thinking. It must be that connection. Anyway.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Although it's interesting when I've played in Quebec, I find that my... And Shetland, for some reason, the Shetland people I've played with and people from Quebec, it sounds more old-time rhythm to me than say Cape Breton, which is very Scottish. It's very on the one. I mean, it's really, really on the one. Then there's a whole lot of... In Scotland in the 80s when we were there, there was a lot of exploration of music that was going on, a lot of traditional bands and people putting swing chords to traditional Scottish tunes.
But before, even the 70s, before that, up in Shetland, his nickname, Peerie Willie Johnson, was a guitar player and the story goes... And Allan tells this story. Apparently he in the 50s, I guess I think it might have been WGY, which is a radio station up in Albany, New York, was all this music that was being played in the 30s and 40s, was bouncing off and landing... People in Shetland could get that radio station, apparently.
He developed this style of guitar that became the traditional way to accompany Shetland tunes with a lot of swing chords, jazz chords and stuff like that. You never know.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. There's so much interesting crosspollination with music, and it's very interesting. Yeah. Especially with this series, I talk to people from different musical backgrounds and I think because music travels so easily compared to other elements of culture, more easily than language. Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. That being said, I always encourage the people that I'm teaching if possible to have them play for square dancers or play for a dance because it is a whole nother experience. It's not just replicating or playing a tune over and over and over and over again. If you're playing for dancers, you can get this wonderful back and forth. We had a wonderful Contra dance band called Coracree.
One of the things that... We played the traditional tunes, a lot of our own original tunes and we push the envelopes a little bit. We always have our eyes on the floor watching those dancers. We've had the feedback where the dancers say, "It was so great. We really felt like you guys were playing for us as opposed to us dancing to you." We said, "Well, yeah, we're getting feedback from what you're doing." I think that's just a wonderful thing.
Leah Roseman:
On season one of this podcast, I interviewed Alexis Chartrand, who's a traditional Québécois fiddler. Both his parents are dancers. Actually his mom's a Baroque dance specialist.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, Alex Chartrand?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, yeah. I know that family. Yeah. Amazing. His father's a great caller and dancer.
Leah Roseman:
That's it.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh my God. Amazing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. You should listen to the episode with him. He plays and we talk about watching dancers.
Janie Rothfield:
I think that's how I found you because I think I saw that.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
That's so cool.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. He was amazing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Let's talk about your relationship to the banjo.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, okay. I thought you'd ask me relationship with my husband.
Leah Roseman:
Well, violin was your first love in music.
Janie Rothfield:
It was my first instrument. The music in my family, my sister, Suzy Thompson, is also an amazing roots musician. I mean, she plays all the different American styles. I don't think she's really done much Celtic music, but she's an amazing blues fiddler, old-time fiddler, bluegrass, Cajun, klezmer, great singer. But my mom was a... I'm just going to move over so you can see my nice banjo. My mom was an old folkie from New York and Brooklyn.
When I brought Allan home and he was singing some of these old ballads, she knew a bunch of them, which I had no idea. But she played guitar and always encouraged us and we had a lot of early folk music records and Pete Seeger and Burl Ives and other things happening in our household. Then when my brothers started getting into playing... Suzy started playing bluegrass and she was playing folk music and bluegrass and Doc Watson, all this music started appearing and records in our house.
It goes back, but I didn't come to the banjo until I think I was living in Los Angeles and everybody was playing the banjo and I decided to give it a try.
Leah Roseman:
It must feel so different than the fiddle. Is there a lot of tension on the strings for your left hand or not really?
Janie Rothfield:
Well, actually I like to tell people I actually fiddle the banjo because I came to the banjo as a fiddle player and I learned how to do the basic clawhammer rhythms, and just played with a lot of banjo players. Never really had any lessons and... Hang on. When I play the banjo, like I'm in the key of D now and a lot of the fingering is similar to the fiddle. This is my F sharp, right?
When I go here, that's my B, same finger on the fiddle. If I'm on the D string, there's my F sharp. I finger the banjo like a fiddler. I didn't really find it to be that hard.
Leah Roseman:
Can you play us a tune and maybe we can talk a little bit about the technique of clawhammer?
Janie Rothfield:
Sure. Let's see. What should I play? I'll play a tune that my friend, Beth Hunter, who's next door, wanted me to help her learn when she was first learning that to play the fiddle. It's a wonderful tune called Johnny Don't Come Home Drunk. Let's see if I can do this for you. The right hand is just similar kind of thing that would happen on the fiddle. Right hand keeps moving and you hit the string with the back of your nail and it's:
There's a little fifth string that you grab your thumb with. You can do all sorts of different rhythm things, and talk about ghosting notes.
Leah Roseman:
I just love the groove and the sound of that.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. It's so fun. I'm teaching a beginner banjo class in Swannanoa this summer. I just spent the last couple of days working on my lesson plan and how I'm going to teach this stuff. I realized I needed to have some good, easy things for them to play. So like You Are My Sunshine, Will The Circle Be Unbroken, When The Saints Go Marching In. Things that they're familiar with, so they can just get their right hand going and then just have it nice and simple. It's a really fun instrument. You should learn the banjo.
Leah Roseman:
Is that a capo you have?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. This is a capo. Basically I've tuned the banjo and it's what's called double C and then a lot of times I'll slap a capo on just because it's easier than retuning. But a lot of banjo players will retune so they don't use a capo. But I'm a working musician, so I got to do what I got to do.
Leah Roseman:
No, no, I was just curious. A non... I don't know what even it's called, the other style of banjo playing that's not clawhammer, what's that called? Just-
Janie Rothfield:
Fingerstyle.
Leah Roseman:
Fingerstyle.
Janie Rothfield:
Fingerstyle. Fingerstyle bluegrass. The bluegrass don't typically retune their instruments. They figure out how to play everything like that. I don't know how to do that.
Leah Roseman:
Are they using like picks on their fingers? I'm quite ignorant about these things.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. They're using picks. Yep. Yep. There's certain patterns that they use and it's very, very complicated, but it's a wonderful... I mean, a lot of people play it and love it and go to banjo camps to learn how to do it. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Bluegrass evolved out of old-time. Am I right about that?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. There's a lot of people who are academics who know all about that kind of thing. Yes. I believe I would go out on the limb and say that bluegrass developed from old style country music because old time was just old style country music. That's just what was played. Then for the banjo, Earl Scruggs figured out a certain way of picking Scruggs-style, but there's an old-time style of picking that's where you're picking the strings, but it's not bluegrass. But I'm not an academic about that kind of thing, but you're right.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. That's already interesting. No, I had read that bluegrass was, like for banjos, more of a solo thing as opposed to old time, which is more accompanimental. Does that make sense?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Well, it's an interesting discussion because... And typically in... And I'm just going to give my opinion about this. In old time, if you're playing old-time session, old-time bands, there's not a lot of soloing going on. Right? In bluegrass, it really is all about the solo, which surprised me when I realized that. I was playing with a wonderful bluegrass fiddler named Blaine Sprouse, who I should connect you with. You should interview him, because his teacher was Kenny Baker.
Blaine is an epic bluegrass fiddler, like amazing. I said, "Hey, Blaine, let's play some tunes." We were at a festival, American Fiddle Tunes up in Northwest. He said, "Okay." I said, "What should we play?" He says, "I don't know, let's play a good old tune like Angelina Baker." I said, "Okay." We're sitting face to face, I start playing, he's chunking and doing chords. Then he starts playing the melody and I keep playing because I want to have this musical conversation.
Then we finish and he says, "Well, you know Jane, usually we don't play those tunes together, you know?" I said, "Well, why? It's fun. We can have some fun, having a little musical conversation and stuff." He goes, "Well, why would I want you playing over my break?" I went, "Oh." I said, "Well, let's do with another tune, but let's not think like we're taking breaks. Let's just play the tunes together."
Then we did, he says, "Oh, yeah, that was really fun. I forgot what that was like." You know?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
But a lot of times when I'm playing at a session or a jam with somebody, sometimes I'll just back off and play chorus because I want to hear what the other person's doing. Or I'll say, "Banjo, take a break." Because I want to hear what that banjo's playing because it could be something marvelous. They're like, "What? I'm not taking a break." Say, "Go on. Go on." It's like... So yeah. It's a different kind of social thing too.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. More like jazz, if it's like taking these solos.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Is there a tune you really like to play on banjo that you'd like to share with us?
Janie Rothfield:
Okay. I'm going to play a little bit of Candy Girl on the banjo, which I played this a little bit on the fiddle earlier. I think that'll be really fun.
Leah Roseman:
Cool. Thanks. It's really neat hearing the same tune on different instruments like that.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. It's kind of fun. You get into this kind of... Especially that tune because it's a circular tune and every time I hit this note, I realize that this note was a little bit flat and I had to force myself to just make it work. An illusion of being in tune.
Leah Roseman:
You play a little guitar too?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. I played backup guitar. Yeah. I'm a pretty good backup guitar player. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Did Allan teach you?
Janie Rothfield:
Allan did not teach me. I learned basic chords. He's showed me a few things, but no, just from playing and listening and sitting on in a few guitar workshops and it's really all about making everything sound good and keeping the rhythm. But Allan is a very good teacher. He's been doing a lot more guitar teaching in the last couple of years and he has a very interesting style of playing backup guitar, which he does these bass run things.
He does different alternate chords up the neck, just gives different voicings. He has his own way of pushing the envelope. He's also a marvelous singer.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I've heard him a little bit. Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I interviewed Brendan Power a few episodes ago on this podcast. People who haven't heard that episode should go check it out. This amazing harmonica player and the album you made with him is so cool. Such an interesting mix of sonorities with fiddle and harmonica. Can you talk to that experience of meeting him and how that got going?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Well, I find that when I'm going to festivals and I think I do this on purpose, but subconsciously sort of ish. Usually there's somebody that I target. I hear them play or something, I go, "I want to play with that person." I'll go up, like Blaine Sprouse, Brendan Power, I heard him play. I said, "Man, we got to play. We got to play together." Said, "Hey Brendan, you want to play?" He says, "Sure." I think maybe had seen me play.
I was there with... This was in Montreal. I was up there with this wonderful, but ill-fated band that didn't last called Panache Quartet, which was four amazing female fiddlers. Me and old-time Donna Hébert from New England, Andrea Beaton from Cape Breton and Véronique Plasse from Quebec and we four fiddles. It was just like... Anyway, so I saw him. We found a little place in a little corner and we just sat down, what should we play?
He had liked American music so he had quite a number of tunes. We started playing together and it sounded really cool. Then he showed me one of his original tunes and I showed him one of my original tunes. It was just really, really fun. Then that was it. Then I was going back to England to tour so I got in touch with him and he came to a Hen's Teeth show and sat in, in a couple of tunes. Then the next time I was there, he said, "Why don't you come down and visit me and my partner, Laura, and let's make an album?"
He does this. He gets involved with different styles, as you know, Chinese music, whatever, and gets deep into it, and so we did. We just recorded this really cool album and his friend, Dave, I can't remember Dave's last name, played a little bit of banjo. We just had a good time throwing some stuff down. Then he actually came to Clifftop with Laura and we had a CD release party there and that was epic. But he says, "Jane, there's so much old time."
He says, "I got to go find a blue session or something." He was going a little bit crazy like, "I can't sleep." Yeah. But that was really exciting. Yeah. I haven't seen him for quite a while, but he's an amazing musician and artist and he creates these harmonicas out of... What is it called? The computer-generated plastic stuff. What's that called?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, he does a couple of different things. I know what you mean and I can't think of the word, but yes, and all these retunings that he does. So innovative.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Very, very innovative in China and all this. Yeah. A great Irish. He was in Riverdance, the first Riverdance, which he said that's how he was able to buy his house. Yeah. Yeah. I miss Brendan. I hope we get to see him again sometime.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. There's a little thing that came up when I was researching old-time music called fiddlesticks. Have you seen this technique used?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. When you whack the sticks on the thing. Yeah. I've seen it used. I've never actually done it. I've had someone fiddlestick me while I'm playing the fiddle, but yeah, it's really cool. I've not seen it around very much, but it'd be a fun thing to learn.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. My orchestra, we just premiered a percussion concerto by Nicole Lizée and the soloist was Colin Currie who's actually a Scottish amazing percussion soloist. She just used so many different techniques. He had across this huge stage, all these different traditional percussion instruments and crazy stuff like duct tape, anything that would make a sound.
Then our principal cellist went up and played and then he was doing fiddlesticks on her, which the first time I'd heard of it or seen it. I thought she'd come up with it. Then when I read about fiddlesticks in Appalachian music, I was like, "Oh, it's a thing that she borrowed."
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. It's a thing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. I don't know much. I have to look that up. I had never thought to look that up. It's probably got a very interesting history and background, you know? Probably-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Maybe someone just did it once at a party and it became a thing, like who knows?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. There's a whole tradition of wood carving and wood whittling and things like that. You can go to the John C. Campbell Folk School. I've taught there a couple of times and they have all sorts of Appalachian folk arts and crafts and all sorts of things and five different ways to cut wood, you know?
Leah Roseman:
Have you ever done any kind of clogging or foot percussion with playing? Is that any of the tradition you've learned?
Janie Rothfield:
Not really. It's on my bucket list. I don't know if I'll ever get to it, but I can do a couple of little dance steps and stuff like that. It's an amazing thing to be able to do. Everybody loves to move their feet. You can just do a basic shuffle step kind of thing and it's going to be good. But some of the people that I know who dance, Nic Gareiss, and all these amazing cloggers and step dancers, it's amazing what they can do.
Leah Roseman:
I was curious if you wouldn't mind grabbing your fiddle again, if-
Janie Rothfield:
Sure.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. We had talked about traditions and some of the mentors you had learned from, and you had referred to someone that you were going to play one of his tunes. Of course, you write so many great original tunes. I was wondering if you want to play one or two to leave out with, or?
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. I'm in cross A. This is a tune that I played a lot. Actually, I think Cameron DeWhitt was the first person who learned this tune for me. It's called... Ah, I'll remember after I'm done. I did make this up on the banjo though, but I like to play it on the fiddle. It's a little bit of a squirrely crazy tune actually. Then on one of his podcasts with my daughter, with Shona, there's a wonderful video of the three of us playing this tune.
Every time I listen to it, I think, "Oh my God. Was that me?" It was so fun. It's so great. It's called... Oh, I know what it's called. Okay. There was a wonderful fiddler from Indiana who passed away way too young. I think he was 50, Gary Harrison, who made up tons of tunes. When I was playing fiddle in my early 20s, I learned all these tunes, I had no idea these were his tunes, so I made up this particular tune and Cameron was the one that said it sounded like a Gary Harrison tune.
I said, "Let's call it Harry Garrison." It's called Harry Garrison. I think I might have recorded this with Brendan too. I don't remember. There we go.
Leah Roseman:
Great. Yeah. I've heard you do that in other settings and it's so different every time. It's really great.
Janie Rothfield:
It is. It really is. It's so funny. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate having a chat with you and getting to know you a bit more, and my offer still stands. Anytime I'll show you how to play the fiddle. It'll be so fun.
Leah Roseman:
I will take you up on that, but I'm curious, you've had so much initiative in your career. I think you just get stuff going and it seems like you have a very outgoing personality. Maybe you're a bit of an extrovert, would you say? You take energy from people, you don't get-
Janie Rothfield:
I do, but it's so interesting, in the last two years I discovered my inner introvert and I discovered that I really like to have my alone time. Yeah, no, I do. Definitely, I suck the energy from other people and I love having interactions and it just makes me feel good. I want everybody to feel as good as I feel when I'm playing my fiddle. You know? It definitely is a calling. Like I remember the moment I... It must have been in, I don't know, the 1990s at some point, early 90s, I think.
We were at a party. I think my daughter was really young and Pete Peterson and Kellie Allen, you heard me talk about them, fabulous musicians. I was sitting there and I was playing one of my tunes. It was a tune called Violet's Waltz. One of my waltzes, and this woman was in the corner. She was weeping. I said, "Are you okay?" She goes, "You're playing with such joy." I was like, "Whoa, that's powerful."
I realized that it was... I'm not a religious person, but I know about religious callings. It was just I just have to do it. I, being quite a motivated person and having quite good sales and marketing skills and tenaciousness and wanting to get things done because I don't like waiting for people to do it for me, that's how I've kept this thing going, because if I don't do it, no one's going to do it for me. It's fun and it feels good.
Leah Roseman:
I guess you're not shy about, like you're saying, collaborations. You just ask. You just approach people.
Janie Rothfield:
Yeah. Most people will say, "Sure." I don't know how often that happens out there. Maybe it doesn't happen often enough, so when someone does ask them if they want to play, they're delighted or something. I don't know. I was at a festival once and I saw this epic old-time fiddler that I know, a contemporary of mine. I played with him once before and I thought, "Oh." I said, "Hey, you want to play?" He goes, "Well, I have plans to play with some other people."
I was like, "Usually that means no." I was like, "Well, when are your plans?" He says, "Well, in two hours." I said, "Look, let's just play a couple of tunes. We don't have to... Just play a couple of tunes and then we can be done." He's like, "Oh." I said, "Look, I don't want to marry you. I just want to play a couple of tunes."
Leah Roseman:
I love it.
Janie Rothfield:
He said, "Okay." He got his wife who played guitar and we played tunes for two hours and when we were done, they went off to their next date. I always tell that story because it's like, "Look, I'm not asking to spend the rest of your life with me. Let's just play a couple of tunes." Because at festivals and things like that, people do have agendas and they have people they want to play with and they don't want to get stuck in a jam that maybe they don't want to be in or I don't know, whatever. It's like... You know? I thought that was pretty funny and it was really fun.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. That's great. You didn't play a waltz or any kind of slow tune.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh, you're right. I didn't.
Leah Roseman:
If you'd be up for it.
Janie Rothfield:
I will.
Leah Roseman:
Let's keep you here.
Janie Rothfield:
I'm in cross A, so I'm not going to retune. This is actually one of my epic tunes. I played this with the Panache Quartet, with the four fiddles. It was amazing and keeping hoping that The Idumea Quartet will work this one up. It's a tune called The Mist. I was actually on a retreat with my sister, Suzy. We were in a yurt in California, off of the coast, south of San Francisco, the epic place. I can't remember what it's called. To do a retreat to play music together and maybe make up some music.
We're sitting there and it was supposed to be a beautiful view and it was completely socked in and it was all misty and stuff like that. She said, "Janie, you should make up a tune." I said, "I guess I will." I looked out the window and at that point, the brown cow was running past the window the owner of the brown cow was running after it to try and catch it. I don't know. It was like, "Oh."
So this tune just showed up and it's called The Mist. Someone asked me if it was The Missed, M-I-S-S-E-D. I thought, "It could be." Because it has that bittersweet feeling. I'll just play this for you. All right. Here we go.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you. It's amazing having these private concerts. Of course, they're not private because my audience is enjoying them as well. That's some of the intimacy of podcasts I like, is people are often with their headphones. Maybe they're going for a walk or whatever they're doing and having Janie Rothfield play for them. It feels like themselves. It's such a neat feeling, I think.
Janie Rothfield:
Well, it's a delight to play. I haven't played that tune in ages, so thank you for reminding me about that particular tune.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for your time and your perspectives and your beautiful music today. Really enjoyed that.
Janie Rothfield:
Oh thank you, sweetie. I'm so happy to get to talk to you. I look forward to meeting you in person one day.
Leah Roseman:
That would be awesome. Okay. Bye.
Janie Rothfield:
Bye.
Leah Roseman:
My life is so enriched by getting to know these incredibly inspiring creative guests and their perspectives on their lives in music. Please follow this podcast and sign up for my podcast newsletter to get sneak peeks for upcoming guests and find out about newly published transcripts.
