Devachan Music - Community Room

The Story Behind the Tune

This is a story about a friend of mine named Mike Springer and a wonderful tune he wrote called "Birchard's Hornpipe." Many people think this tune, quite popular in contra dance circles, is a traditional (or even a Canadian) tune. In fact, it was penned by a young old-time fiddler from California, and has an interesting story intertwined with personal associations for me.

Springer was an ardent Tommy Jarrell fan who, in the mid-70's, turned on a number of Southern Californian traditional music enthusiasts to the older fiddling styles. I believe he wrote this tune after being around a lot of Irish music; it was intended as a Southern old-time fiddler's way of hearing an Irish tune. Therein lies some of its popularity; it has a great tune's spaciousness and malleability, not only leaving room for individual players to add their twists and turns, but able in fact to leap whole genres in a single bound, as it has. Like Columbus's egg trick, it's obvious (once you've heard it).

I learned one of my earliest and best lessons in tune-writing from Mike, during a week he stayed at my house while we wrote and shared tunes. Suffering at the time from an acute Iroid condition, I constantly hoisted myself on the fledging tunesmiths' petard of crowding all the ideas I could muster in 32 abused and protesting bars. (I pray my first tune, "Lori's Bedspread", or, "The Elves' Quilt" never sees light of day...) Mike's tunes were compact, economical, well-formed, catchy and, most infuriating of all, popular. His observation: "You seem to write tunes from the outside in. I write them from the inside out: I start with one seed idea that floats in by itself, then I push and pull and add filler until it's a tune." This guiding principle transformed my way of thinking up (or through) tunes; years later I am still exploring the nooks and crannies of this idea. (See Tunesmithery.)

More...

There's more to the story. A trip East confronted Mike with some of the darker aspects of Southern old-time music—heavy drinking, self-destructiveness, the sense of musicians' culture being at odds with church-going, rural community values.

Some time after his return, Mike went up to Grass Valley, California to spend Christmas with his mom. While out in the fields playing the fiddle he heard Satan speaking to him out of the tune—goading him on to play it one more time, add in one more lick. He suddenly felt imprisoned and compelled by the music, and not in the laughable way we mean when we speak of someone being a "tune-aholic". Then he heard another voice, telling him he could stop if he chose. He put down the fiddle, got on his knees, and dedicated his life to Jesus on the spot.

Mike's conversion to fundamentalist Christianity stunned the insular old-time music crowd in Southern California. Some treated it with derision; others thought it made sense in light of some hard events in his life—that he was someone who had truly been manic or compulsive about his music.

The last time I saw Mike, many years ago now, he visited me in my shared house in Venice Beach; the same house where Barbara Birchard had lived when she swapped Mike shiatsu massage treatments for fiddle lessons for her husband John (whence, incidentally, comes the name of the tune). Mike gave me a copy of the Book of Isaiah, and struck me as not at all wild-eyed and brimstone-spouting. He said he had stopped playing fiddle completely after his conversion, but eventually starting playing again; mostly hymn tunes. The only one of his old tunes he would play; the one he felt was light-filled—was "Birchard's Hornpipe."

Just as Springer's chance remark about tune-writing has come back to me many times, the nature of his spiritual experience is one I've wrestled with as well. Aren't tunes beings that, once conceived and nursed in our thoughts and released into the world, take on a life of their own? I guess I've come to believe that there are forces that assist or hinder that process of formation—as well as forces that can subtly turn it towards their own ends.

I think of Robert Schumann, who would "...sit for hours, lips pursed shut, monitoring a musical conversation between Florestan and Eusebius, as he called the active and the passive sides of his personality." [from an Edmund Morris review in the New Yorker, Jan 8 1990]

Perhaps it's a small step from our daemons to our demons, and angels and devils do dance in our struggles with the rise and fall of notes.

Comment? Use the Tag "Birchard's Hornpipe"

(BACK TO STORIES & FABLES)