You can use this book to learn how to play, but it clearly isn't a conventional, instrumental instruction book. It doesn't give you technique drills. It doesn't start off with a basic tune, show you each note, then tell you to go off and practice it until you've mastered it and are ready for the next tune. Hanon would be ashamed of this book.
I've compiled things all of us who play old-time music have learned, but no one ever seems to say or write down.
You could use it as enrichment, to accompany the book you're learning to play from or the lessons you're taking.
You could use it as an intermediate text, after you already know how to play and want to make the transition to being a dance musician, or to feeling comfier playing in jams with strangers.
You could use it if you're an experienced, advanced musician, to get someone else's perspective on this music we've been passing around and evolving for so many generations.
You could use it if you're a music teacher for ideas to throw in your lessons, to help your students graduate from music students to musicians.
You could even use it as a primary, beginner's text, in a music-ed analogue of language immersion. It's a written-down version of the beginners workshops I've been teaching since the late seventies. I run into folks all the time who started playing in one of my workshops or jams, heeded my advice, and are still playing. Some have started their own jams and dances and workshops.
I've built workshops around permutations and combinations of this material, and watched callers and dancers come in to sit on the floor and listen, so they could get a better feel for what the musicians are trying to do. This is a one-size-fits-all book about being an old-time musician.
What order are the entries in? Any order and no order. They're a bedtime browsing breviary. The entries are fairly independent, so you can skip around, picking this up and putting it down, reading whatever strikes your fancy.
Or you can traverse them systematically, marching through them in the one true order, like the hundredth monkey.
You bought the book. It's yours to do with as you will.
