Baltimore Old Time Music Festival celebrates city’s long history of fiddle and banjo
The Baltimore Old Time Music Festival at the Baltimore Museum of Industry is an acoustic celebration of music played before recordings.
A party by the Inner Harbor this weekend celebrates Charm City’s long tradition of tapping a foot to the fiddle and nodding in agreement with the banjo.
The Baltimore Old Time Music Festival on Friday and Saturday at the Baltimore Museum of Industry is an acoustic celebration of music played before recordings. The loosely defined American genre lays ancient African and Celtic folk narratives over different forms of the same four or five strings.
“Old-time music is made for the living room and the front porch,” organizer and artist-at-large Brad Kolodner said.
For Dom Flemons, one of the festival’s headliners, old-time music has an inherent connection to face-to-face storytelling.
“You have to think of folk songs as being literature and storytelling. When it comes to old-time fiddle tunes, many times these songs are very noncomplex. You relate to them,” Flemons said.
The festival at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on the water in the Locust Point Industrial Area is sold out on Friday night while a few tickets remain for Saturday.
History
Maryland and Baltimore were instrumental to the commercialization of the banjo, which moved from handmade tradition to instrument of 19th century blackface, 1940s bluegrass and the folk revival of the 1960s.
Banjo maker Pete Ross stretches goat skin over gourds to sell custom instruments out of his home studio in North Baltimore’s Waverly neighborhood.
In 2019, he built a custom banjo for the Amazon TV series “The Underground Railroad” based on a drawing of string instruments from Jamaica published in 1707 and a watercolor drawing in South Carolina from 1785.
“Maryland is a major part of the story of banjo history despite people making assumptions it has to be Appalachia or the Deep South,” Ross said.
Ross and historian and author Kristina Gaddy are giving a talk on the banjo in Maryland on Saturday afternoon.
Gaddy said the first written record of the banjo in Maryland is from a 1748 newspaper advertisement for a runaway slave for a man named Toby who played the banjo and fiddle. Another newspaper advertisement from 1749 said escaped slave Prince plays banjo well and took with an old fiddle, Gaddy said.
Baltimore was also where the banjos transitioned into a moneymaking enterprise.
Likely the first commercial banjo maker in the United States was German immigrant luthier William Boucher Jr., who set up shop downtown in the 1840s. Gaddy said any banjo depicted from the Civil War era is 90% likely to be from Boucher, who tweaked the design of homemade instruments for commercial mass production, according to the National Museum of American History. The museum has an 1845 banjo by Boucher in its collection.
“Baltimore was a large industrial city south of the Mason-Dixon Line. There were free African Americans, slaves, white people and immigrants all in Baltimore,” Gaddy said. “Through that mix of industry and culture, the city brought people into contact with the banjo and black music.”
The success of Boucher’s banjo business coincided with the rise of minstrel shows where white performers in blackface makeup played banjos before the instrument was associated with white bluegrass and folk players in the 20th century.
“It was the folk tradition meeting with the theatrical tradition and the representation of race. It was a time when you didn’t have black people performing on stage. You had white performers that blacked up their faces to show a version of black culture by playing a banjo,” Flemons said. “Some of it was absolutely despicable and at the same time still part of the foundation of American popular music and an underlying piece of the American landscape.”
Instruments
All instruments at the festival will be acoustic as the sound will vary from old-time to ragtime and from blues to bluegrass.
Kolodner will play a gourd banjo Friday night handcrafted by Ross. Flemons said he will play a bit of guitar and banjo as well as cow rib bones cut to length while finding time for a harmonica solo during his Saturday set.
Flemons was raised in Phoenix and says he comes from a family of civil rights leaders, Tuskegee Airmen and preachers in the Arizona Black community. In 2010 he won a Grammy Award with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band he co-founded with Rhiannon Giddens for their album “Genuine Negro Jig.”
Flemons and Cheick Hamala Diabaté, a musician from Mali, will be teaching a workshop on the roots of old-time instruments and their relation to African instruments on Saturday evening. Diabaté is a world-renowned player of the ngoni, an African relative of the American banjo, and will also be showcasing the akonting, another precursor. In Malian tradition, a “jali” or tribe storyteller holds on to hundreds of generations of history through their ngoni, Flemons explained.
“The banjo is not an instrument from Africa. It incorporates all the African instruments in it of itself,” Flemons said. “We don’t know if slaves brought instruments with them, but they definitely brought the memory of making instruments with them across the Atlantic.”
Local modern scene
The old-time festival, now in its fifth year, is an annual capstone of a local music scene alive through rowhouse shows, weekly jam sessions and monthly square dances that are also largely driven by the Kolodner family.
“Both Brad and I are the organizer types,” said Ken Kolodner, who plays a hammered dulcimer and has taught a few hundred students and organized as many concerts in Baltimore.
The festival, co-produced by arts nonprofit the Center for Cultural Vibrancy, started in 2019 and returned from 2021 to 2023 with a capacity of 400 people at the Creative Alliance in Highlandtown. This year it made the jump to the Museum of Industry to increase capacity to around 1,200 and mostly sold out. The venue has space for three stages, vendors and workshops both inside and on the waterfront.
“We’re trying to inject joy into Baltimore through these events. Selfishly, I want to go to a square dance and have a jam session and am motivated to make sure we have these things in my hometown,” Brad Kolodner said. “Old time, I don’t love the term. I might change that someday. Old time is ambiguous and evokes an era of way back when. I don’t know. I want it to feel current .”
If you go
The Baltimore Old Time Music Festival is at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on Friday and Saturday. Tickets for Friday’s performances are sold out. Saturday day passes ($52) and Saturday night square dance and concert passes ($25) are still available at BaltimoreOldTimeFest.com.