Clyde Davenport evokes another era, in both his fiddling and attitude
by John Sewell
In the music world, credibility is a premium asset. And, to the chagrin of most musicians, credibility is something that cannot be manufactured.
If you're looking for the real deal, you won't find anyone truer than Appalachian musician Clyde Davenport. The 80-year-old fiddle player has become a sought-after commodity, despite the fact that he actually never courted fame. For Davenport, creating music has always been an end unto itself.
Talking to Davenport is kind of like entering a timewarp. A resident of the tiny, rural enclave of Jamestown, Tenn., the fiddle player tells things as he sees them, peppering his language with countrified slang.
"I can tell you how long I've been a' playing: I started when I was nine years old and nobody ever taught me anything," says Davenport. "I played a tune straight through the first time I ever picked [a fiddle] up. I always played my own style because if you've got a style, you've just got to do it that way."
"I'm knowed everywhere," Davenport continues. "I've been everywhere. I got a plaque from the National Endowment, I've got a letter from President Bush: the first President Bush, that is. I don't keep that stuff though—it never meant nothing to me."
Davenport, a recipient of the National Heritage Fellowship, just played his music and let the world beat a path to his door. In his case, "the world" came in the form of Bob Fulcher, a mountain music fan who went on forays deep into Appalachia in search of true mountain music. Fulcher, who has accompanied Davenport for almost 25 years, first found his mentor at a tiny music store in Monticello, Kentucky.
"It's funny, I went to Monticello looking for a man named Blind Dick Burnett," says Fulcher. (Burnett is the author of "Man of Constant Sorrow," a classic tune first brought to popular consciousness on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?) "I was interested in meeting older musicians, and Blind Dick Burnett told me about Clyde's fiddle shop, which was underneath this pool hall. I was totally surprised to find this shabby little place. So I talked to Clyde, and he told me that he didn't know how to play. Then I talked to some other people and they told me that Clyde did play, and that he was just messing with me."
Davenport has a similar memory of his first meeting with Fulcher. "Bobby comes into my workshop because somebody had told him where I was at. He said can you play a fiddle and I said no. He came back the next day and asked me again and I said, 'Well, I guess I could pick it up.' I'd never seen him before that first day, and at first I thought he was just some hoodlum..."
"I went back to Clyde's shop and we laughed about it; then he picked up his fiddle," says Fulcher. "He played these breakdowns and they were so pure and smooth. He pulled a tone from his fiddle that is extremely hard to do, and I don't think a symphony player could even do what he does. Clyde has perfect pitch. And to this day his sound is like pure water flowing around you. It's a balm. It's like this harmonious vapor that just enshrouds you."
Next thing you know, Fulcher had booked Davenport at a mountain music festival. The two began a musical relationship that continues to this day.
"Clyde plays an older style, one that is very eccentric and odd and beautiful," says Fulcher. "Some of Clyde's songs are what people call crooked tunes: they're not as predictable as the usual nursery rhyme type, rhythmic style. This comes from being cut off from the standard loop. It's just a very old fashioned style of fiddling associated with the Southern mountains.
"Almost all of the fiddlers in Tennessee that are Clyde's age have abandoned the repertoire Clyde uses," Fulcher continues. "Clyde plays these odd tunes, and then he'll play a technique like the hillbilly players of the 1920s used. It's more a blues style that evolved from the close proximity that black and white players had in the industrial south."
For the upcoming Laurel Theatre show, Davenport will be accompanied by Fulcher on banjo and Michael Dubois on banjo, guitar and fiddle. The program will feature both of Davenport's stylesliving renditions of bygone
music, reproduced by a master.
"They say if it weren't for me, they'd have lost a lot of those old tunes I play. Actually, I lost a lot of them when I put [the fiddle] down for 15 years," says Davenport, referring to when he quit playing because of work and family obligations. "I put it down when I was 35, 'cause I had other things that were more important. I never cared about [fiddling] much no way."
October 31, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 44
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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