He glanced around to see the effect the tune was having on the crowd. Daisy Kreider, who was accompanying on her guitar, was smiling and watching Michael intently, the way she always did when she backed up another musician. That was one more thing he loved about Daisy, as though her looks and personality weren’t enough.
Michael played on, having left the melody for the improvisation at which he excelled. With the crowd’s attention fixed on Michael, Elmer used the moment to hold his own fiddle to his left ear and quietly check to see if the alternate tuning had held. It had, and he put the fiddle back on his lap on top of the dry, aged sheets of music he’d been studying, and listened to Michael finish his tune. Let him have his moment of glory. Elmer was going to cook him and serve him on cornbread. Elmer’s music was going to be scary as hell.
He found it in the attic, in a battered cardboard box full of music that his mother had gotten from an old violinist just before his death. He’d remembered the box when he was thinking about where he might find a new tune with eerie qualities for the contest. To his disappointment, the box was filled with formal violin exercises, classical sonatas, and dozens of Victorian era solos with piano accompaniment.
Still, he dug to the bottom, hoping to find a collection of folk tunes or Appalachian ballads, something previously unheard by the other kids and the judges. All the way at the bottom of the box, underneath a small pile of chipped and brittle Bach sonatas and partitas, was an even more time-ravaged piece of music. The paper, if paper it was, was cracked and yellow, torn in many places, and he saw immediately that the music was written by hand in black ink, as were the somewhat uneven staff lines. There was no title, nor was there a name of any composer, but what he found of immediate interest was that at the top left of the first of the two pages were four capital letters separated by vertical lines, reading “F|E|A|R.”
When Michael Wilkins played the final bars of “Jerusalem Ridge,” he put everything he had into it, ending with an improvised cadenza that made his bow a blur and caused the strings to howl. The audience, in turn, howled their approval, clapping and cheering as Michael took a small bow and nodded to Daisy in recognition. From the way she smiled back at him, he knew she’d been mightily impressed with his performance.
More so than Elmer Zook, that was for sure. That big old farm boy was clapping hard enough, but the smile on his face said to Michael, I’m gonna get you now, town boy.
There it was, wasn’t it? Farm Boy and Town Boy. When it came to bluegrass music, street cred didn’t matter. What mattered was cowshit cred. It mattered to Ken Groff anyway. A former tractor jockey himself, Ken always seemed to favor the hicks, the ones who had old-time music, not only in their blood, but also symbolized in brown on the bottoms of their boots. And as head of the Smoketown Bluegrass School, Ken had his favorites, of which Elmer Zook was number one.
Michael had to admit that Elmer was a helluva natural musician. The kid had chops. His sight reading was impeccable, and he could spend a minute reading a new tune on paper, and then play it from memory. On top of that, his technique was impressive and his ear was sharp, and he could recreate old Kenny Baker solos note for note.
His sole failing was creativity. Michael left him in the shade as an improviser, but Ken Groff wasn’t bothered by it. Ken’s instruments were banjo and guitar, so he was easy to impress when it came to fiddle.
Now Ken stood up, still applauding, and faced the small audience of about two dozen people – students, parents, and a few friends. “All right, let’s hear it for Michael and ‘Jerusalem Ridge!’ Really good! But the question is, was it scary? Remember, this is the night of the Halloween jam, and we’re lookin’ for the scariest fiddle tune ever heard! So far we’ve heard ‘The Devil Went Down To Georgia,’ ‘Little Sadie,’ and now ‘Jerusalem Ridge.’ Those raise a few goosebumps?”
Most in the audience chuckled, and there were a few shouted out yeahs and nos. Michael had put his fiddle back in its case, and now sat next to Daisy in the second row. “You playing for Elmer?” he whispered.
She shook her head. “He’s playing alone,” she whispered back.
Michael looked at her closely, trying to figure out whether she was pleased or displeased about not playing with Elmer. Their rivalry over Daisy was an established fact at the bluegrass school, though neither had yet gotten up enough nerve to ask her out. Ken alluded to it now and then, sometimes subtly, sometimes less so. One of his more blatant comments, offered when Michael and Elmer collided trying to open a door for Daisy, was that the two boys should do a duet on “Hell Among the Yearlings.” Both Ken and Frank Withers, the fiddle and mandolin teacher, laughed hard at that one.
When Michael looked up the title on Google, he found that, besides being the name of a Gillian Welch album, it was a fiddle tune he hadn’t been aware of, and that the title referred to young, rambunctious cattle. He wasn’t flattered.
“All right now!” Ken said. “Our next fiddler is our old buddy, Elmer Zook! What are you going to play for us, Elmer?”
“It doesn’t have a title,” Elmer said softly, as he stood up, tucked some sheets of music into his case, and closed it.
“Well, you gotta call it something,” said Ken.
“I, uh… I guess just ‘Halloween Tune,’ maybe?”
“Okay then, ‘Halloween Tune’ it is. Is it scary?”
It was awful. He had taken the music down to his room, closed the door behind him, and tried to play the handwritten notes, but they made no sense. He figured that a piece of music entitled “FEAR” would sound weird, but he didn’t think it would be altogether crazy, like this was. If a tune ever sounded like pure cacophony, this was it.
He sat down on his bed and looked closely at the brittle old sheets of music. There were no other notes, no name of any composer, just the four letters, separated by lines, at the top of the page:
F|E|A|R
Then it occurred to him that the lines themselves might have some significance. Instead of the letters indicating the title, maybe the lines meant the letters were something more than just letters in a name.
A tuning.
Guitarists used alternate tunings all the time, tuning their strings up or down to create an entirely different tonal sound. He’d never heard of anyone doing it on a fiddle, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.
He picked up his fiddle and looked at the letters, “FEAR,” again. Then he tuned his G string down a full tone to F, his D string up a tone to E, and left his A string as it was. But what, he wondered, was the R? Notes on the scale went from A through G – there was no note R.
But as he looked closer at the handwritten R, he saw that the looped upper part was larger than the straight lines that made up the bottom half, and he realized that if he ignored those lines he had a letter D. So was the composer making a wise-ass joke of some kind? Giving the piece a title while slightly hiding the proper tuning?
He tuned the highest string, the E, down a full step to D, then picked up his bow and drew it over the four strings. The D-E-F, three notes side-by-side, made for a strange dissonance, but one that brought a twisted smile to his face. Then he stood up, put the music back on the stand, and played the first few notes, fingering on the altered strings exactly as he would have on the standard tuning.