Old-Time Fiddling

New York State
USA
Website: www.mort.net Contact: info@mort.net

Ken's Web Pages Brooklyn, New York, USA , Website: www.mort.net/users/krm Contact: ken@post6.mort.net

Ken's Old-Time Fiddle Web Pages

I became interested in Old-Time Fiddling in the summer of 2001. One of my grandfather's best friends (Jim Bryner) was an old-time fiddler. He used to make cassette tapes of the old mountain music for my grandfather. I began learning how to fiddle by listening to CDs I made from those tapes.

Jim 'Ike' Bryner Tapes: Information on the tapes Jim Bryner made for my grandfather, along with some of the music in MP3 format.
Old-Time XML Standard: It would be really nice to be able to search all the repositories of old-time recordings that are available on the internet. If a common XML definition were established then a search could be submitted to all the known repositories and a combined result could be returned.
Samuel P. Bayard - Song Index and Performer List: An electronic copy of the song index and performer list from Samuel P. Bayard's book; song index and performer list from Samuel P. Bayard's book; "Dance to the Fiddle, March to the Fife - Instrumental Folk Tunes in Pennsylvania".
When I started learning fiddle tunes from the Jim Bryner Tapes, I didn't know the names of any songs. Sometimes a name would be mentioned on the tape, but often I couldn't hear it clearly. Kerry Blech suggested I locate of copy of Samuel Bayard's book to use in identifing song titles. This was a great resource however, sometimes I could identify (or guess) only a couple words in the title. By converting the song index in Bayard's book to electronic format, I could search the song index for single words in the anywhere in the song titles.
These files are in plain ASCII text format. There is one line per title or performer, so in some instances a line will be very long.