Every week, they'd have a potluck, then pull out instruments and beer, and play tunes. Sort of.
Half the folks quickly stopped coming because they didn't like sounding awful. The other half laughed and had a good time. Almost incidentally, they also learned how to play. After a year or so of this, she realized, in an epiphany, she was no longer the worst person in the room.
I started playing old-time music in Seattle, which had a roaring music-and-dance scene. About a year later, when I moved to Colorado, I knew that's what I wanted to do. I went around to local music stores asking where I could find old-time musicians.
As they say, "You have questions? We have blank stares."
When I got the occasional person who knew what I was looking for, he'd say, "We don't have that here. You could switch to bluegrass."
Worse, I played guitar. Playing backup guitar is no fun without melody instruments.
After a couple of months of searching, I found a couple of beginning fiddlers who knew what I was talking about, Kyle Sadlon and Betty Kuntz, and we started a weekly potluck and jam. The only question at the end of our evenings was, "Whose house next week?"
We weren't any good and we didn't much care. That summer, we went down to the local mall, where we'd put out the hat, play tunes, and collect enough money to go buy coffee and say, "Let's do this again tomorrow!" From time to time, someone would run up after a tune and say, "I've been looking for other folks who played old-time music," so we'd invite them to the potluck.
We found another group of folks who'd done the same thing, so we coalesced our jams. As time passed, the location settled into my living room. Other jams popped up in other places when people got tired of driving.
We started dances, which followed the same arc. At first, there were only enough folks for a square or two. Musicians and dancers and callers were interchangeable and we had no sound equipment. Someone -- Teri Rasmussen, maybe -- found out we could use Left-Hand Grange #9, in Niwot, and David Levick, who lived nearby, fed us with big batches of spaghetti beforehand. Dave Brown bought mikes, speakers, and an amp. I bought some cheap monitors.
Dan Weingast, a banjo player from New York, wanted to be able to go to a music festival, so he started one. He found out he could rent Trojan Ranch, a kid's camp straight up the mountain, for a weekend on either end of their season, just before opening or after closing, for a price that would let even broke hippies, like us, go if we all chipped in. We ate well -- he'd cook us up spanakopeta for 100. Dancing broke out spontaneously.
Today, the MoonFest is still going, plus there are other festivals around the state. Our contras are packed. Chuck Palmer and co-conspirators bought a building, the community laid a dance floor and built a stage, and Jim Borzym, a caller and acoustic engineer, gave it the best acoustics of anyplace I've played in the country. Music-and-dance communities have sprung up all over the state. Last year, I called a dance in Glenwood Springs, on the other side of the Rockies, with an unbeatable local band and over a hundred dancers on the floor.
But still, my living room fills with music and musicians every Wednesday night, no matter what. Some nights, we're two, some, twenty. Friends come just to sit on the couch and read or tat to music. We've been going, without pause, since 1978.
If I'm sick, I go into my room, shut the door, and the jam goes on without me. If I'm out of town, I give someone else a key. J.C. Miller, from Maryland, comes walking up the stairs once a year, sits down, and pulls out his fiddle. He doesn't even check beforehand to see whether there's going to be a jam. Bill and Patti Cummings, musicians from Flagstaff, Arizona, arrange their tours so they can be here on Wednesday nights.
When someone I haven't seen in a while asks me, "Is there a jam this week?" I say, "Is God still making Wednesdays?"
We have all levels. Folks who only want to play with "the hot musicians" quickly stop coming. Quite a few musicians started playing at the jam -- me, included. I'm now an entirely plausible facsimile of a mandolin player.
I'd go so far as to say I'm no longer the worst person in the room.
At beginners' workshops, I ask everyone to go around and say where they're from, so they can see who lives nearby that they could start a jam with.
People passing through from out of town will say, "I wish I lived someplace with a music-and-dance community like this." I say, "You can."
