In Vermont: A Fiddlers' Contest

By John Show

The pizza-stand proprietor gets his coffeepot going, and chilled citizens begin to line up, hoping to get a grip on the morning. A camper rolls into the parking area, and within 30 seconds after it stops, four men of assorted ages have jumped out, driven two stakes into the grass and started pitching horseshoes. People drag aluminum chairs and cases of beer out of the backs of their cars and lug them over to the lawn that faces the bandstand. Encouraging smells begin to drift from the beef barbecue pit. The day's first Frisbee frizzes across the gray sky. Warmup musicians, two men and a woman of a group called Bluebird, plug in their guitars. Here in Rutland, the Grand Old-Time Fiddlin' Contest is gathering momentum.

Too much momentum has been a problem at some of the New England fiddle contests, especially the big celebration held each July at Craftsbury, Vt. This year a crowd of some 25,000 people--an alarming mob for Vermont--swarmed over the town common on the day of the contest, stayed all night and broke up outhouses to burn in campfires. An abundant young woman wearing bib overalls and nothing else, as some accounts have it, got up on the bandstand at Craftsbury and danced. The opinion in Rutland is that she was a hippie. The voters of Craftsbury decided to cancel the affair next year, though it could be brought back by petition.

The Rutland contest is the descendant of a smaller and less volcanic gathering held each summer for eight years in Newfane, Vt., until it outgrew the five-acre tract owned by the father of Promoter Bill Morse. Morse, 29, a quick-talking flea market proprietor who wears a Stetson, a fine clawhammer coat and jeans, says he moved his contest to the state fairgrounds here when neighbors began muttering about the mobs. Now he was wondering whether crowds and contestants would show up in sufficient numbers on this stern October Saturday, when ski trails visible on Killington Mountain a few miles away were already white with snow.

Behind the bandstand, over by a string of boxcars parked on a siding, Bill Cameron, 17, of Orange, Vt., and his father Enoch, 71, are standing back-to-back in the wet grass, practicing their competition tunes. The two Koehler girls from Westfield, Mass., ten-year-old Gretchen and seven-year-old Rebecca, skitter about giggling until their mother Shirley tells them to get down to business and start practicing. They are astonishingly good. Shirley, who is a nurse, says that neither she nor her husband Jim, a welding engineer, is at all musical. The girls started playing the violin in a school program and learned to play country style from a high school boy named Craig Eastman, now 19 and a contestant here in the open, or adult division. The girls enter one or two contests a weekend from May to October, and not long ago Gretchen took a first place against adult competition at Leominster, Mass.

A newcomer who wanders into this scene not knowing what to expect notices first that everyone seems to know everyone else. Dress is plain and runs for both men and women to tractor-fixing clothes, nondesigner jeans and faded flannel shirts hanging out from under jean jackets. There isn't a sequined vest or pair of DayGlo satin Grand Ole Opry overalls in sight.

The contestants are amateurs, although some of them make a few dollars working occasionally in country bands. No one is going to get rich today; the top prize in each of three divisions is $150. The music, too, is plain; instruments with electronic pickups are not permitted, nor (except in trick-and-fancy divisions of some contests) is double-bowing, which means playing two notes at once.

David Carr, a friendly, bearded fellow from Bakersfield, Vt., says that in the more austere contests ("This one is really just a big party") tunes written after 1911 are not allowed. Carr, who wears a leather cowboy hat because, he says, it is easily recognizable and leads to offers of beer when he wanders in the audience, is a fiddler, but he has brought his guitar too. Since there is a shortage of guitarists today, he has agreed to play backup for more than half of the contestants. This means that he will be competing against himself, but this, he says, is commonplace; there is a pleasant quality of neighborliness at fiddlers' contests. He excuses himself to warm up Joe Lecouffe, 76, from Windsor, Vt., who is trying to play Redwing with blue fingers. Lecouffe says later that he learned to play his fiddle as a child in Canada, then gave it up and started again about ten years ago. "Read music?" he says, grunting at the humor of this. "I don't even know what key I'm in till someone like Dave Carr tells me."

Everyone gets through the arctic morning, huddling in blankets and blowing on fingers. The sun joins the party after lunch, and the audience, by now a fairly good lawnful ("Round it off to 4,000," says Morse with a promoter's optimism), begins to thaw out. There is a lot of good-natured yah-HOOOOing when one of the contestants gives a good down-home rendition of Whisky Before Breakfast or Chinese Breakdown. Dancers weave among the lawn chairs. A beery college boy with a painted face gyrates for a while and then collapses, to rise no more. One of his friends tries to jump a small brook in front of the bandstand and lands square in the middle, to moderate applause.

Little Gretchen Koehler gives a driving, foot-stomping performance of Paddy on the Handcar and takes second place in the junior division. Her teacher, Craig Eastman, wins the open division flat out. Enoch Cameron plays Blackberry Quadrille and wins fifth place in the senior division, for musicians over 60. His son Bill takes third in the juniors. Neither Dave Carr nor Joe Lecouffe wins a thing except a day in the fresh air, and neither gives a hoot.

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