If you close your eyes and listen carefully, you can almost hear it whisper above the plains. Growing louder, it jigs among the evergreens as if performing some ritual dance, then bursts into wild rhythm over long-ago fields of wheat and wildflowers.
Prairie music, old-time music, part of American folk life picked from the strings of banjo, fiddle and mandolin. It`s part of the Midwest`s past, almost forgotten but always there, like memories of Grandma`s favorite quilt and Grandpa`s old cap. It`s a reminder of a time when life was a little simpler, when folks could get high just by steppin` to its rhythm and dancin` to a caller in Aunt Mae`s parlor.
Lynn ”Chirps” Smith, 39, of Grayslake wants to keep it alive. (He picked up the name Chirps from a sound he makes on his fiddle.) Old-time music, he said, is special. ”This is really old. This is traditional music that was traditionally played not just in the Appalachian Mountains like a lot of people think but all over the country.”
A native of Charleston, Ill., about 160 miles due south of Chicago, Smith plays his fiddle at dances sponsored by the Chicago Barn Dance Co., an organization that produces barn dances in and around Chicago, and at concerts and festivals with a group called the Volo Bogtrotters. Last summer he performed at the Smithsonian Institution`s Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C., and he`s even served as a role model through an
apprenticeship program sponsored by the Illinois Arts Council.
One of the program`s goals, said Loretta Rhoads, director of ethnic and folk arts programs, is not only to preserve and teach but to pass on and keep alive a traditional art form.
”Chirps, in spite of being very young, is a very, very fine artist,”
Rhoads said.
Music isn`t all there is in Smith`s life; he is a technician in microbiology and sterilization services at Abbott Laboratories. ”He`s a pretty quiet person, and he has a subtle sense of humor,” said Gaynelle Stamm of Waukegan, who got to know Smith when they worked in the same department at Abbott. ”The kind of work he does he loves, and he`s good at it.” But, she said, it`s obvious that his true love is music.
The same attention to detail that he lavishes on his fiddling also is apparent at work, Stamm said, adding, ”It`s interesting how scientists are often musicians.”
Smith took up mandolin in the early 1970s and originally performed with the Indian Creek Delta Boys, a string band largely interested in finding and documenting traditional music in Illinois.
Eventually Smith and several other musicians decided to form a group that also would perform vocals. The Volo Bogtrotters originally included Chicago residents Fred Campeau on vocals, fiddle, banjo and banjo-uke (a stort of ukulele); Steve Rosen on vocals, banjo, tenor banjo and banjo-mandolin; and Tony Scarimbolo on vocals, string bass and harmonica. Smith could be heard on vocals, fiddle, banjo-mandolin, tenor banjo and mandola, while Jim Nelson performed vocals, guitar and banjo-uke. Nelson since has left the group, and Larry McBride of Crown Point, Ind., has joined the Volos on guitar.
But it was with the Delta Boys that Smith`s interest in Midwestern music took root. Listening to various recordings and old 78 rpm records, the Delta Boys realized most of what they were hearing originated from Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia-the Appalachians, not the Midwest.
”We felt Illinois must have musicians in it, fiddlers, banjo players, people who like to dance,” Smith said. ”Sure enough, in looking around, we were able to fill in some of the gaps.” The Delta Boys helped connect Smith with senior fiddlers throughout the state, and he found the old-timers`
fondness for the instrument catching.
”You can`t separate the music from Chirps,” said Campeau, who has known Smith for about 12 years. ”He`s great, and he`s been at it quite a long time. His thing is collecting the music from around Illinois, Missouri, and he`s doing an excellent job. I think anybody that plays old-time music is unique, and everybody contributes in their own way. Chirps just has a little bit longer history than people his age.”
Smith ”is really coming out on his own as far as being a real influential fiddler,” Campeau continued. ”He was raised in Illinois, he`s a real Midwesterner, and there`s that particular feel about his fiddling. I think that`s why he`s become such a real sought-out musician on his own. He loves the music so much, and he really loves to share it with people.”
”The way I learned my music the most was from going out and meeting old- timers all over central and southern Illinois,” said Smith, who acknowledged that he never had a fiddle lesson but did play flute in junior high school band. ”You can learn a lot from old folks. I learned how to fiddle, got a lot of good stories, met a lot of nice people.” With his warm smile and gentle features, it`s not surprising that people find it easy to talk with Smith, including a 98-year-old fiddler from downstate Illinois whom Smith met in the mid-`70s.
”He`d had a stroke and couldn`t play anymore,” said Smith, who can`t remember the old man`s name. ”He must have been quite the fiddler and banjo player in his day. He told of how he played dances on riverboats . . . on the Ohio River. He would play in a little boat that would go on excursions. He was out there playing one time when the boat started sinking. He was rather worried about his fiddle and banjo. He figured he could swim to shore, but a fiddle and banjo were hard to come by.”
Smith also met Jessie James Abbott, and old-time fiddler from Toledo, Ill., who influenced Smith`s playing. ”He was an interesting fellow,” Smith said. ”He was born in southern Missouri in a covered wagon. He had a very large family; his first wife had died. He was in his 80s and his second wife was about 38 or 40. His kids ranged in age from 65 to 14. He knew a lot of really unusual tunes nobody else played.”
One of the things people enjoy most about Smith`s playing is his large repertoire of music, according to his wife, Dorothy Kent. ”He`ll play at a jam session or party 16 hours and just keep going and never repeat a tune,”
she said.
”I`ve probably forgotten more tunes than some people know,” Smith said, guessing that ”hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” make up his repertoire.
The fact that Smith is keeping old-time alive is important, said Art Thieme, Smith`s friend and a fellow musician who once hosted the ”Flea Market Radio Show,” which aired on National Public Radio during the mid-1980s and was broadcast from the Old Town School of Folk Music, 909 Armitage Ave., Chicago.
Old-time ”is one of those things that teaches kids where we came from, shows `em how we got from here to now,” Thieme said. ”Old-time is a way of stepping back in time. Those songs were handed down from person to person until they got to Chirps. He`s the one who holds on to them for us.”
”Old-time is the roots of country music,” Thieme said. ”It`s the roots of bluegrass music. The old-time music was what people played for barn dances, country dancing. Bluegrass music was a way of commercializing it, speeding it up, more music per square inch. `Folk music in overdrive` is what they called it. But what Chirps and the Volos play is the real thing. It`s what they call old-time music, as opposed to bluegrass.”
”To get the traditional sound, the rhythmic sound, all the fiddlers play differently, and you get different regional styles,” Smith said. ”Once you`ve been in this game awhile you can tell, `Oh, yes, that sounds like a West Virginia fiddler,` or `That sounds like a Mississippi fiddler.` ”
Regional differences were more pronounced in the early days. People learned tunes from one another, resulting in distinct individualized styles.
”In the old days, nobody really traveled around,” Smith said. ”People would be born, live and die within a 10-mile radius. You could pretty much tell this little area over here had a certain way of playing, had a certain repertoire of tunes. This place over here had a different one, and over here it was different again.
”Back then, old-time was usually music for dancing, not typically the waltz with your spouse or even the step dances popular in today`s country music nightclubs. This was dancing with an attitude, to songs like `Turkey in the Straw` and `White River Stomp.`
”Sometimes people`s feet would get going so fast it would be hard to see them moving. Some say steppin` is a great way to stay in shape. But it really started out as a form of entertainment.
”You were sitting around your little house on the prairie in Illinois, there`s not much goin` on. People had to make their own fun.”
In southern Illinois, and elsewhere, too, typical homes of the day usually had just two rooms. At the pick of a fiddle, the small space could quickly become a dance hall.
”The fiddler and the caller, which was sometimes the same person, would stand in the doorway,” Smith said. ”They`d clear the furniture out and there`d be a square of people in this room and a square of people in that room.”
Barn dances were also a way of sharing the music.
”Sometimes, when the community would help somebody build a barn, when they got the floor all done or they reached a certain point, the owners would have a dance to pay back the people that helped build it,” Smith said.
In the 1920s, radio and the formation of many recording companies began to break down old time`s regional barriers and caused many a fiddler to hang up his bow.
”When radio came along, it really changed the character of the music,”
Smith said. ”A lot of the old fiddlers got displaced. Nobody needed them anymore. People could just turn on the radio, and later the TV, for entertainment. A lot of fiddlers pretty much quit.”
On the flip side, ”the big recording companies did a pretty good service,” Smith said.
”They found out they could make money recording fiddlers and selling `em back to the people. Quite a large volume of really obscure music was recorded in the `20s and `30s. Music recorded back then ran from opera singers to minstrel show songs.”
The character of music was also changing.
”Younger people wanted to play some of the jazzier stuff, so the music slowly shifted and branched out,” Smith said. ”Bluegrass came out of (the traditional sound), and country music, which has now gotten pretty rock `n`
rolly.”
Smith`s own album collection, which he shelves lovingly in his basement along with photographs and souvenirs of his travels, includes ”all kinds of weird stuff-banjo solos, swing bands, people playing the saw, opera singers-just everything.”
His music is there, too. Smith appears on three albums with the Indian Creek Delta Boys-collector`s items, he said, because they are now out of print.
He`s also on three cassettes with the Volo Bogtrotters and has his own solo tape, titled ”Prairie Dog,” which includes tunes from Illinois sources. Smith sells the cassettes for $9, including postage, and said they can be purchased by writing to him at 141 N. Lake St. in Grayslake, Ill. 60030.
