Janie Rothfield is a powerhouse Old-Time fiddler and banjo player who performs and teaches at camps and weekends all over the country and the world! Janie shares what she thinks is important for fiddlers to learn and work on. Is it the fingering or the bowing? Hear all about Janie's Jumpstart camps and about her current projects.
The tune today is Waiting for Sandy from Janie's album Out of Thin Air.
Check out Janie's website to get the dates of her upcoming camps and performances!
Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, or Buzzsprout. Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.
Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
Janie Rothfield is a powerhouse Old-Time fiddler and banjo player who performs and teaches at camps and weekends all over the country and the world! Janie shares what she thinks is important for fiddlers to learn and work on. Is it the fingering or the bowing? Hear all about Janie's Jumpstart camps and about her current projects.
The tune today is Waiting for Sandy from Janie's album Out of Thin Air.
Check out Janie's website to get the dates of her upcoming camps and performances!
Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, or Buzzsprout. Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.
Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
Welcome to the Fiddles Studio podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wolbus-Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of the tune Waiting for Sandy from the album Out of Thin Air by Janie Rothfield. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking to the old-time fiddler and musician, janie Rothfield.
Speaker 1:Janie is often called a powerhouse fiddler. I definitely agree with that. When you hear her fiddling you'll know why they say that she plays fiddle and claw, hammer, banjo. So we have another banjo player and she plays a lot of different genres, but mostly, I think, these days, old-time. We'll talk about that. The list of bands that she's in was so long that I think you're just going to have to go to her website, janierothfieldcom, and take a look at all those different bands. She's been a very popular teacher at camps and festivals for many years and she has her own home-based camps for studying old-time music that are called Janie's Jumpstart Camps, and I hear that they are a lot of fun. Hi, janie, welcome to the podcast, hey nice to meet you, meg.
Speaker 2:See you again, even virtually, I'm so excited to talk today.
Speaker 1:I think that we both started off studying Suzuki violin. I'm the worst because I grew up studying Suzuki and then I became a Suzuki teacher. But you came up in Suzuki and then went other places, so I don't know. Do you want to just give us the overview of how you got involved in roots and traditional music?
Speaker 2:Well, it all started with my mom, my wonderful mother, who was a folky. She grew up in Brooklyn in New York. When we grew up there was always music going on Pete Seeger and folk-esque kind of music. She played the guitar. I never really realized exactly how much she really knew about it until I brought my husband, alan Holm, from Scotland. When I went to Scotland during my junior year abroad, I brought Alan Holm and he is an amazing traditional singer as well as a guitarist and he'd be singing these Scottish ballads and she knew them. She knew the words to these obscure Scottish songs. So it kind of went deeper than I had ever even realized. We always had music around the house Getting started at a very young age.
Speaker 2:I think I might have been five when me and my three siblings my sister Susie Rothfield, susie Thompson, who's an amazing fiddle-er in her own right, and my twin brother John and my older brother Larry we all went to Juilliard every Saturday for music lessons and I got the Suzuki teacher, I got Miss Louise Barron it was a good match for me, let's just put that way Got up through Book Four and then we moved away up to Connecticut and I never, ever practiced ever again. So I sort of where I actually learned how to shift and do vibrato, I think that last sort of classical technique. So I mean I could play, I could kind of read music-ish. I kind of faked my way during school orchestras and things like that, but I got it. You know, I got the good grounding of being able to play by ear and play in tune and have pretty, pretty good technique, I guess you could say. And then Susie, who is a little older than I am, she started playing folk music and started playing bluegrass in Connecticut. There was a lot of fiddling going on in Connecticut because of a lot of the Kepaqua. People came down from Canada, settled in Bristol and there was a fiddle comp, the New England fiddle contest, and I went to bluegrass festivals and went to the Bristol Old Time Fiddlers Club and got up there in the stage and they said we have a little Janie Rothfield here from West Hartford, connecticut. What are you going to play? I'm going to play St Andrew. You know I just started doing that, probably about 13. I really haven't looked back since. It's been an amazing ride, let me tell you. But the Suzuki grounding and just having that great experience of enjoying playing music and I didn't see practicing for me was kind of fun because my mom accompanied me on the piano and it was amazing. I was really. I was very lucky to have that experience, so I highly recommend it.
Speaker 2:Recently I was working on my computer and I, oh my gosh, I just didn't want to do any more work. So I Googled Miss Louise Barron, who is my teacher, and he was on this eight episode interview of her on YouTube and she must have been in her 80s and, oh my gosh, she just, I just remembered her so well, her voice, the way she looked, she was so amazing. So I'm listening to this interview and then she says you know, it's really not so much about the melody, it's all about the rhythm. And I just was like, oh my gosh, that's. I don't ever remember her saying that to me. I was really young, but that's what I talk about all the time when I'm teaching and so that was very vindicating for me.
Speaker 1:I have a question for you kind of about that. I know you play a lot of different styles. This question came because I was listening to you on a banjo podcast and you were talking. I think the guy was trying to really nail you down Like what exactly style, like how do you play? And you're like it really depends on who I'm playing with and how I can interact with them. And as a fiddle teacher, I mean I'm curious your thoughts about that and then also just the process of getting to that stage. I feel like a lot of people learning instruments are very in a bubble of how does this thing work and I sometimes just wonder, as a teacher, how to get them to a point where they're starting to listen to the folks around them and have that experience, that joint musical experience.
Speaker 2:When I'm teaching, a lot of times I'm really going for the automatic pilot or the sort of disconnecting, the too much thinking, because I think that gets in the way of the natural ability to do things. And a lot of times when I'm teaching, if someone's kind of stuck, I'll say well, did you do a sport or are you a painter or trying to get something that they can associate physically with what I'm trying to explain verbally, if that makes any sense at all. So, if it has to do with getting a bounce in your bow or feeling rhythm or loosening up, playing something that's a little bit looser, not as harsh, and getting a little bit of softness to the bow movement or whatever it is. And somebody said, well, they did the hurdles. I'm five one. I mean I could never even jump over anything, let alone a hurdle. I said, okay, so you know, like when you run up to the hurdle, you're running really fast and you put your foot down. You don't just put your foot down and it stops, it gives a little bit, and then you have to push off of the ground to get up over the hurdle. And they said, oh, so that's what I'm talking about with the bow, when we're using the bow to get some sort of pressure on the bow. A little bounce to the bow and they went oh okay.
Speaker 2:So a lot of times what I'm trying to do is just get people to have a physicality to what they're doing with, mainly with the bow, because the left hand kind of does itself usually not as hard. You know the subtleties in the bow. It's like if you grab a crayon and you push the crayon down on the paper and then you learn how to hold a smaller crayon, then you learn how to manipulate the crayon so you're not whooshing it or a paintbrush or using a knife when you're cooking. Just trying to find some sort of metaphor. That's with your hands, I guess, mostly, but a physicality that's gonna make your brain go. Oh, I think I know what this lady wants me to do and then try and apply that to what their brain understands, like if you were a soccer player. You don't just run up to the ball and just kick the ball. You put your leg, does back a little bit, goes a little further and then it comes get this momentum. So these kinds of things is a lot of what I use when I'm trying to help people get that physicality. The other main thing that I do I know other teachers do this as well, but I'm a.
Speaker 2:Really this has just been a game changer for my students is using your voice, not just singing the tune, but using your voice and vocalizing how you want that tune to sound. So if a melody goes dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum, which is the A part to Waiting for Sandy, which is a tune that we're gonna talk about later, it's not just the notes. You gotta sing it with all the inflection like you wanna play it Yum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum or whatever, and then no instrument. Then you do air bow, like air guitar. You do air bow to the voice. The bow listens to the voice and the voice follows the bow. So if the rhythm of the bow is da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, then the melody will attach to the bow.
Speaker 2:So what I'm trying to say is it's it's all about the bow setting up the rhythm of the tune or the meter of the tune, because you can have the bow doing all sorts of things and have hardly any fingers going. But if the bow isn't doing its thing, you can have all these fingers going and it's not rhythmic. The whole singing thing, the vocalizing thing, taking away the instrument, taking the bow and the fiddle away and using your voice and using air bow and using moving your body. I mean, you can't see me out there in podcast land, but I'm like moving my body, I'm like shaking my head. Yeah, to get that kind of physicality, then the brain will sort of feel it, as opposed to thinking about it.
Speaker 1:I don't feel like with adults. I've asked about other physical skills. It definitely came up with kids about like, what else do you do in trying to connect it, but I love that idea. I have been a little bit obsessed with how to stop thinking because I've recently learned the concertina and I'm working on the button accordion and one of my strategies has been to play a tune in a lot of different keys while I'm trying to read a book and not paying any attention to what I'm doing. But my poor family is listening to me hit the wrong button over and over again. But I'm gradually making it so that I'm not thinking and I feel like one of the things I'm doing this month is just talking about how to play faster and a lot of times the idea of speed that if you're stopping to think about what you're gonna do with your hands, it's too slow. Right, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that for anybody who's learning an instrument even when, if it's not a fiddle, like for you on the button accordion, the concertina use your voice and play along with your voice, because that will make you get there and it will also force you not to stop and try and correct, because I think when we stop and correct, a lot of times we get sort of almost stunted at the part that we're not doing as well as we want. But just keep going, because eventually I think this is my philosophy it'll all catch up eventually. I had a follow-up question.
Speaker 1:Okay, I love the idea of singing it and kind of scatting it or lilting it in the way that you want, and I actually covered that recently. I was like, think about a drum set where there's a lot of different timbres, and then that's what makes it interesting, not just the same drum over and over. But how does a student get from like they can hum the melody to having a style in mind, having a groove that they're aiming for? Is it just listening to other players?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, I would not say hum anything, Because we're just humming the melody right. It's a little harsh, I know, but and it's the rhythm.
Speaker 2:Now, you said it, it's the rhythm. You have a tune like twinkle, twinkle little star, old-time rhythm, whatever. So it's just, it's pure Suzuki. You just take a simple melody and you just attach the the rhythm to it. If you sing it with without any of that rhythm, you're I don't think it's gonna come out on the right hand I Really don't. So I like to say just really exaggerate the rhythm. So let's find it, let's figure out another tune like I don't know, like Angelina Baker melody. So I'm singing the melody. If I sing it like that, I'm gonna play it like that. It's gonna sound like. But if I say yeah, I'm More likely gonna play it like that's because your brain is really learning that the tune is has rhythm to it as opposed to it Just being the notes. So that's, that's my final answer.
Speaker 1:How much are you having your students sing?
Speaker 2:all the time. All the time we do it together. I Correct them. We sing it. Sometimes we just sing the rhythm of the tune. So, angelina Baker, right, so you take the music, take the note right out of it and then you do that with your bow. Yeah, you can't see me in pod land, but if you do this with me, you can use your bow. Yeah, daddy, did it. Daddy, did it dad. Yeah, dad, I did it dad. Yeah, that's nice. So people anyway, take everything that's an impediment away. She was air-bowing that, but I guarantee I don't know a lot of guarantees in this world. I've been doing this a lot in the last number of years I guarantee it will change your playing Absolutely. It's hard to do, though, because you're retraining so much, because we learn to play the notes and then we learn to do the bow, but it's got to be the other way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, folks are really, really focused on where do I put my my finger on? What string, how do I get it in tune? I have one more teaching question for you, and then I I really want to hear about the camps, but somebody just asked me this recently and I was like I don't know what to tell this man. He was a beginner and he was like how good can I get on this and what do I have to do?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, let's see, I'm gonna pull up my old sales training. I had an advertising sales training background many years ago. I would ask a question To that question because I would say well, how good is good. What does that mean to you? Does it mean you're gonna play like Janey Rothfield?
Speaker 1:or Bruce.
Speaker 2:Molsky or Rana Gellard or Benton flippin or whoever it is, or does that mean that you are good enough to play in a moderately tempo jam at your local jam, or Start a band or play fast enough to play for a square dance? So Then you can find out those answers and then you can say, well, yeah, we can get you there. These are kinds of things that you'll that you know you have to sort of do.
Speaker 1:and, of course, so first define good.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know everybody is one question that I always ask people what I'm teaching. I say, if I could wave my little Janey magic wand and you could change something about your playing, what would it be? And it's always the same same thing. People want to play faster, they want to be able to play in a jam, they want to play with better rhythm and they're bowing, they're bowing, they're bowing. Usually it's not that they want to learn thousands of tunes. You know, you can spend your life learning all the tunes, but usually it's all those different kinds of things. So then that's what I'm usually I'm focusing on when we're teaching. I'm teaching us to get the the basics going and get that automatic pilot going, and Also tell people you know you don't have to play all the notes. It's better to have the bow doing its thing. Then you can apply all the notes, but you don't have to play them all. But if the bow is doing its thing, the notes will happen, even if you're not playing melody that makes any sense.
Speaker 1:Something you'll never hear from a classical violin teacher.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know it's different, it is different. But you know, if it's a means to get to the end, which is to play all the notes, well, why not? Because if the bow is doing its thing, let's do that. Let it in a minute. I need it, I need it, I need it, I need it. The bow is doing thing. You know, the fingers doesn't have to match every bow stroke Because it's rhythm, right, that's, that's something that people can come and find me. I'll show you how?
Speaker 1:So you're teaching a lot of these things we're talking about at your jumpstart camps? I guess I'm just curious how you got into doing it such an interesting concept, sort of a home-based little mini weekend, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I um, it's probably let's see, it's January. This is the 10th year. I was looking through my stuff in my computer the other day because I've got a whole bunch of them doing this year, which is how many years have I been doing this? The first one was January 2014, so probably about five years before that, maybe even ten years before.
Speaker 2:I was very frustrated, not for my own, my own self but I was realizing, looking at a lot of the old-time camps, especially bless everybody's hearts for doing camps. It's a lot of work, it's a labor of love, but there weren't any women on staff, hardly any women. It was bad. It was B A, d Bad. I mean I started putting on Facebook just ratios without an explanation. You know, 24 to 2. It was bad. And I thought, well, you know, it's not that I'm not getting hurt, it's just it was just proportionate. So I decided I was going to have my own camp and I was only going to hire women instructors. That was the concept. And then I talked to and I thought maybe I would only invite women. And then I talked to some of my men friends, they go, we want to go too. I said, okay, it'll be for everybody. And then I didn't know where to have it and I didn't want to take a lot of risk by like. My dream was to rent a huge house in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but that was not very smart, too risky. So now I was talking to my friends, pete Peterson and Kelly Allen, who are amazing old time musicians and they have a big house and do lots of things, and Pete said well, why don't you have it at our house? I was like, okay, great.
Speaker 2:So then another year went by because I didn't know what to call it and my son, jamie, was doing a jumpstart course for the SATs and I thought, oh, jumpstart, that really is like part of my philosophy, because I want to have a camp that's not about teaching all the tunes but teaching people how to play them better, focusing on technique and rhythm and not slugging down tons of tunes, and have it be very relaxed and in a home setting, so you're not running from building to building or from room to room and where's my next class and work with your teacher the whole weekend so you can really delve deep and have tiny, tiny classes. Because it's a house, you know six to eight people per instructor and have all the food there and have a nice bubble. So we did it when we had our first one in January 2014. We had banjo and fiddle and guitar and I've done them gosh in many countries and many different states and people want to have a.
Speaker 2:Let me come in and take over their house for a weekend. It's very turnkey. This is my little sales pitch. It's very turnkey. I take care of everything. I have to put up a few instructors, the students stay off site and I get insurance and the food is really yummy and they're really really, really, really fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So people should sign up to come learn and also host you if they have a big house.
Speaker 2:If someone's interested in the idea of that, they should just get in touch with me and we can chat and it's a fit. It's a fit. If it's not, it's okay. Yeah, so that leads up to 2024. Happy New Year, everybody. I was going to just sort of give you the little low down. All the information is at JanieRothfieldcom. If you're in Cleveland, near Cleveland, or want to come to Cleveland, ohio, on the weekend of the eighth of March, this is going to be the fourth one I think I've done there. Oh, but before that, coming up on the weekend of the 23rd of February is going to be the first one in Miami, florida. So I'm very excited about that, and Rachel Eddie is going to come down. Join me for that In April. Pittsfield, massachusetts. This will be a second one in Pittsfield Massachusetts the weekend of the fifth of April. Last one will be in Oxford, which is the flagship of the Janie's Jumpstart. That's going to be in October and the 11th of October. Anyway, that's the Janie's Jumpstart pitch.
Speaker 1:It sounds really fun. You should definitely come. I grew up as a New England Contra Dance Fittler but since I live in Baltimore, I'm basically forced to try to learn and master old time music. When I got in touch with you today, kind of spur the moment, you were so nice that you're willing to do this, but you also said well, I have to leave the country on Thursday for this project that I'm working on, and the project is called the Idumia. Did I get it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, almost, that was pretty good. The Idumia Quartet it's the name of a Sacred Heart song. We do a couple of takes on some of that music.
Speaker 1:So it's a string quartet. I just looked at the website. It deconstructs and reconstitutes Appalachian folk music, drawing from minimalism and experimental music. That sounds very interesting. Can you talk about it?
Speaker 2:It started life actually with myself and a wonderful cello player and fiddle player, hard player, band player, nathan Bontrager, who is originally from Pennsylvania and lives in Cologne in Germany, and Nathan and I, over the last 10 years I guess, we'd see each other at festivals and we'd play. He's a wonderful cello player and we would play all this music and play some of my original tunes. And then one day, yeah, we were at Clifftop and I remember them all. We were playing and nobody else was there, it was just the two of us and we finished this tune. I looked at him, he looked at me. I said, oh my God, that was so good, that was pretty good. And I said we have to play, we have to do some gigs. He says, well, I live in Germany. I was like, well, I'll come to Europe. So we managed between the two of us to put together a little tour, did some teaching in Germany and took public transportation around Europe for a couple of weeks. And then, I think it was during that trip, we met up with Ewan McDonald, who's a Scottish fiddler, also a wonderful old-time fiddler, who lives in London, and Becca Wolfe. She also plays a lot of traditional music and had played a lot of old-time music and lives in Athens, greece, and we were in Kent playing in a pub and they were there, and so we invited them to come and play with us.
Speaker 2:And by that time Nathan and I had been deconstructing some stuff, like we were going out on limbs and really taking things and kind of going off of playing it the same way every time let's just put it that way, and that was the kind of thing that we really liked doing together. And so when Becca and Ewan showed up, we said come on and play. And they played something they'd never heard and it just clicked Same kind of thing. We said, oh my gosh, this sounds really good. How are we going to do this? And so over the last numbers of years we managed I'd go over to Europe a couple of times and do some gigs and we somehow we managed our schedules to get together and some little tours and we made this amazing recording in an old farmhouse outside of London with big pictures of ancient people on it and it felt like I was just kind of like a place of rolling stones might have been. You know, we set up in this big, huge room and recorded this really amazing album which had the best reviews. I mean, I could never have written the kind of reviews that we got for this album. And then we were all set to tour the album in March of 2020. Yeah, oh no, so that didn't happen. Finally, we got together this last thing in March, that's right. So we had a last March first time in three and a half years and worked up a bunch of music and in the meantime, a promoter in Germany loved the band and decided to put this tour together for us and I get my own room. I'm very excited.
Speaker 2:But the music is, yeah, a lot of it's a traditional Appalachian music, like we take sally in and we just explode it. It's just, it's crazy. When we all play together, we just go for it, go for things that are interesting and go off on tangents, and then we follow each other to the edge of the, the edge of the branch and start sawing the branch off and then somehow come back again and anything was game If it was interesting. And it's some of the most challenging music I've ever played, not necessarily technically, but there's a lot of things going on and none of it's written down. I mean we don't have sheet music for this thing. I mean, some of these pieces are, you know, six, seven, eight minutes long. What's the name of the album you made? Oh, it's called More Than One. More Than One. It's on Bandcamp. You can also go to theidomeacortetcom and it's there as well. So yeah, enjoy. You have to play it kind of loud and be ready for a little bit of a roller coaster.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna play it for my kids. They like strange music. The stranger the better. They listen to hyper pop.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know what hyper pop is, but I like that. Hyper folk, maybe hyper old-time music. Yeah, I like that, that's a good name.
Speaker 1:So Janie, you have, I think you're. You're in the middle of listening to your mixes and I I know what that's like. It's really an experience of a project that you did. That's a duo album with your husband. I finished a duo album with my husband this year and there were wonderful things about working together and there were challenging things about working together. What brought you two together to this?
Speaker 2:project. Well, alan, I met Alan when I was a junior at college in Scotland. I went went abroad to Aberdeen, scotland. He was up there actually playing at a concert, the folk concert, the first week. I was there and wearing overalls because he'd just come back from America and he was singing a bluegrass song in search of Emilia Earhart. And so of course I went and introduced myself after and told me about the Folklow. We just kind of, you know, we kind of liked each other and then we played music together. He liked the American stuff, I like the Scottish songs and so we've been doing this mash-up of old-time American traditional and original because Alan writes and I do as well and Scottish traditional music for decades. I mean a long, long, long long time.
Speaker 2:So when we started out together we were a duo and then we quickly became a trio with Martin Haddon who played bass with the Amazing best band in the world Silly Wizard from Scotland. You know a lot of experimental stuff. I realized as I'm speaking to you I've been what's the envelope metaphor pushing the boundaries, pushing the envelope, moving outside the lines for my entire music life. I mean really. I mean I started playing very traditional and learning from older musicians in New England and records and things like that. But I pretty quickly kind of Realized that I like to go outside the lines a little bit. And then we, you know, in the 90s we we had jobs and we had two kids and we played a lot of contra dance music on the weekends and you know other projects with lots of other people. And then we decided just randomly in September we had a like a week off and so I said let's, let's go and do another duo album. So we went down to our friend Al Tharp, who is an amazing banjo player and the plank road string band banjo player from Luxington, kentucky. He was in town and he set up mics in his little living room and we just banged on an album and it's pretty good. Yeah, I'm really enjoying it.
Speaker 2:There is, it's an interesting experience to not only play music with your husband or partner but to go through that emotional thing that happens when you're creating art. You know, sometimes it's can be Hard to agree on certain things and you have to know when hold them, know when to follow me, you know. So. For instance, today we were listening to one of the tracks. I'm sort of just a little disappointed, because it's good and it's a tune that I wrote for my parents, but it just doesn't. It's just not have that je ne sais quoi, that thing that I really wanted to have. So unless we find another take, it's probably not gonna go on the album, but all the other stuff is sound really, really good and it sounds like us and yeah, I don't have a title for the album yet, so congratulations on your experience as well.
Speaker 2:I'm looking forward to hearing it.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Do you ever disagree about chords? Who gets to decide?
Speaker 2:You know, it's not so much a chord thing with us, it's usually has to do with certain embellishments that happen with the guitar.
Speaker 2:We argue about chords. Now, he is brilliant here. I mean, no one else sounds like Alan, yeah, so the other thing is that. So, alan, are doing a lot more stuff together, which is really exciting duo things and playing at festivals. And we're gonna be playing at the Baltimore Square dance on the 16th of March with our friends Rick, rick and Joanne Davidson, who produced the dolly in the devil double CD a year ago, which I'm on a lot anyway. So we're looking forward to doing that. And then, you know, got a bunch of camps. We're teaching Bando camp north I'm on the board for music camps north so there's Banjo camp north and there's also fiddling there too and the Great Lakes music camp in Michigan in October, and then Midwest Banjo camp in Indiana in June and Alan's teaching Scottish songs at Swannanoa Celtic week this year. So All things Janie and Alan, how's that? Yeah?
Speaker 1:absolutely, and everyone should go to Jenny's website, jenny Rothfield calm, and you can see the camps and the jumpstart camps and Get signed up and get on. Do you have a newsletter?
Speaker 2:I do have a newsletter. I just sent one out actually. But if you want to go to Jenny Rothfield calm and go to the contact place, you can put your name in there or you can just send me an email and I can send you an update. You know, when you do a newsletter and you say what's happening in your life coming up, it's kind of like really looking, but fun yeah.
Speaker 1:So our tune for today is called Waiting for Sandy. This is an old-time tune in D that Janie wrote, and my understanding is that it's about Sandy not a person, but a storm, yeah, so it was.
Speaker 2:This tune. Waiting for Sandy was inspired because of the Superstorm Sandy that was racing up the East Coast on October 2012. Just looked it up on Google there I was sitting at home in our house outside of Philadelphia. My mom was calling me, I got to fill up your tub with water and put the ice in the freezer. Blah, blah.
Speaker 2:I was getting all anxious, and Alan and my son who was a teenager at the time, I think they were in the next room watching like walking dead marathon or something, and I was in the other room and I had the weather channel on. I was slightly freaking out. I was imagining trees falling on the house or on the car. No, we didn't have any trees around our house, but there was a tree next door that did come down with a big bang, and so I was getting more and more anxious. Oh no, this is ridiculous.
Speaker 2:So I turned off the weather channel and I grabbed my banjo and this tune showed up, and most of the tunes that I make up kind of show up, quote out of thin air, hence the title of my CD of original tunes and I picked it up and it just, it just flowed out. The only change I made was on the B part. I went to an E minor on the third pass and that's as my niece Allegra said, that was the portents of doom, putting the minor chord in there and it's a really fun little tune A lot of people are seeing to be playing at these days and it's a it's a good tune. So, waiting for Sandy.
Speaker 1:Leading for Sandy and you can check out the album out of thin air, which is all your original tunes. You must write a lot of tunes.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not as prolific as some people. I probably don't have more than 50 tunes. I don't imagine some of the melodies yeah, you know, she's like whoa, I never actually added them up, but it's definitely not that many but a lot of the tunes actually that I make up end up being melodies for songs and so they get out of the tune category. A lot of those things. Alan, I've done a lot of collaborating. Where I'll write a tune, I'll say this tune needs words and he writes words, or yeah, but that's an album. Actually, you know, I realized recently when someone was asking me how they could find out of thin air that I never put it through CD, baby, or, and it's not anywhere digital, which is kind of really ridiculous. I really need to do that. I will do that some very soon. Bandcamp right, I need my assistant to do that. Oh, that's me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, professional musicians right, janie Rothfield, thank you so much for all of your insights on teaching and all the information about where people can find you and hear you and learn from you. I'm really glad we were able to do this.
Speaker 2:This was fabulous. I mean just like hanging out with my girlfriend talking about music and telling stories, and it's just been great. You do a great job and I really appreciate you inviting me on your podcast.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddle studiocom, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.