About every two years it seems, the community and family around the late John Hartford and his artistic legacy make a move that gives me an opportunity to talk about a Nashville legend and a hero to nearly everyone in today’s string band music scene. I’ve written about the publication of John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes, a various artists album setting some of those tunes to music, and Sam Bush’s Hartford covers album Radio John, which was nominated for Best Bluegrass Album at the Grammys. This week, Team Hartford took things to a new level of warmth and whimsy.
On Monday night, dozens of fiddle aficionados gathered at the funky American Legion Post 82 in East Nashville for Hartford’s Mammoth Marathon, a performance of all 176 fiddle tunes collected in the Mammoth anthology, which was published in 2018. Fiddle and cello playing sisters Brittany and Natalie Haas anchored the performances, while a fellow up front kept count with a big number flipper. Over the course of about four hours, more than 20 other musicians joined in various combinations as they played through the book’s chapters, organized by eras of Hartford’s life and composing.
The evening’s emcee, fiddler and educator Megan Lynch Chowning, wearing terrycloth sweatbands on her head and wrists to embrace the marathon theme to its fullest, welcomed the folks on hand (plus a livestream audience) by expalining that Brittany and Natalie “just thought it was a totally normal thing to do to play through the 176 tunes in the book, and we said, would you be willing to do that in front of people? And they agreed to it.”
And with that, the sisters lit into “Jack’s Mandolin,” hand written in pencil in the first of what would become 68 spiral bound notebooks that Hartford filled with more than 2,000 original tunes over the last 20 years of his life.
“John was a prolific everything-er right? He did everything, a lot,” Chowning told me. “He drew a lot. He wrote a lot. He had all these ideas, and they all had to come out all the same time.” She was an editor on the book, a player on Vol. 1 of the Fiddle Tune Project, and for the past couple of years, she’s led a small band playing the music at festivals and house concerts around the country in an entertaining, educational roadshow to protect Hartford’s legacy. “He immersed himself. And I want people to take that approach, even if it's just a little bit, in their own lives.”
Also on hand was Katie Harford Hogue, John’s daughter, who said the Mammoth Marathon was in keeping with Hartford’s way. “When dad got into something, he got into something, sometimes to excess and sometimes to his own detriment,” she told me. “So (this idea) just seemed to fit his personality. Like, why not? Why not play them all at once?”
While I took a break to go to dinner, I did hear the first tunes and the last tunes, plus most of the ones in between, and through it, I did feel closer to Hartford’s musical mind. Early on, the mood felt like a Nashville twist on old world chamber music, like gavottes or minuets from the 18th century. Later there were phases that felt more like western swing, Appalachian, early Americana parlor music, and Irish reels. The tunes are all about melody, and Hartford had an advanced feel for the balance and line that makes melodies strong. Chowning noted that he composed like the banjo player he was, with many tunes in the banjo-friendly key of G, and with a lot of arpeggios rather than connected scale notes. Some tunes felt easy to count in common 4/4 time, but there were quite a few waltzes, and a few pieces that featured dropped beats or measures, a characteristic of some mountain fiddle songs.
On stage over the course of the evening were Darol Anger, Sharon Gilchrist, Adam Chowning, John Fabke, Forrest O’Connor, Sami Braman, Kristen Andreassen and her husband Chris “Critter” Eldridge, Tyler Andal, Vicki Vaughn (new repeat winner of the IBMA Bass Player of the Year award), Jack McKeon, Tristan Scroggins, Joe Newberry, Chris Sharp, Wilhelmina Frankzerda, Mike Gaisbacher, Troy Gilchrist, Nashie Greer, Ellie Hakanson, Kaitlyn Raitz, Omar Ruiz-Lopez, and Douglas Waterbury Tieman. Matt Combs, one of Hartford’s closest students and co-author of the Mammoth Fiddle Tune Collection, played a chapter of the book's songs with his wife and two daughters.
Funds from the night’s cover charge are supporting the production of a second recorded volume of Hartford fiddle tunes, which is in the works.
