Buffalo Girls, Won't'cha Come Out Tonight...

The foot taps with the rhythm smoothly, keeping time with practiced ease that made up for any physical deficiency brought on by the weight of 90 years of life. His hair was thin and white, and his hand tremored slightly as be brought his pint—the 3rd since we arrived, a true Scotsman—to his lips. Each time he would take a long, slow quaff, savoring the thick amber, and his hand would grow still for a brief moment, his mind too busy reflecting on his days as a wee baern to remember its age.

I imagined him a Highlander, though “Bob” didn’t have a particularly traditional bent to it. But he knew the Highland tunes by heart, even if the words were from Virginia. The Scottish tradition reborn on American soil, cross-cultural communication through folk. An old man reliving his Scottish youth through a song written thousands of miles away about the same sorrow and love and adventure.

“Buffalo girls won’tcha come out tonight…”

Yeah, my own youth in rural Ohio…

All the lads here, 70, 80, 90 years old, tap their feet and sip their beers and nod knowingly at the universal theme about the one that got away, the one that left, the one they didn’t want but should have. The performer, Yank Jeff Werner, based his life on the learning of American Folk Songs from Appalachia, the Deep South, Coastal Carolina, and everywhere else where the dirges and forgotten and marginalized of society clashed headlong into emergency rations of banjos and fiddles and guitars. He brings out the little dancing man, the likes of which I had never seen but on the dusty shelves on Cracker Barrel General Stores. You know, the little wooden figurine with moveable parts attached to a stick; you bounce a platform while holding the stick, and the little man does the moon walk or break dances, much to the delight of the roomful of old folk singers in which I now sat.

Werner would recite the refrain of each song as he began, sometimes several lines long, and by the second stanza, the whole crowd was singing along, even the unfamiliar tunes mastered easily by the life-long folk singers.

Traditional folk singers and musicians in Scotland follow a thousand years of history and passion and struggle and pride. They are raised with it; it becomes a part of what it means to be Scottish (or Irish, or Welsh, or Appalachian…). Performing for them means provisioning for a high level of audience participation. Folk singing for them is about life and is a social activity. For modern, American folk singers, young hippies of the hobo-nouveau generation—travel without the adventure, music without the passion—“folk” songs (few of them traditional) are about looking cool and impressing the chics. Scottish folk involves an intimate knowledge of the music, a deep, satisfying relationship with tunes and rhythms and lore. New American “folk” involves knowing three notes on a guitar and plucking at them until some semblance of a melody comes out. Where did traditional American folk singer go? Where’s the talent, the heartache, the love and resilience and sorrow?

“I never had the yen to write songs,” Werner says, wiping his forehead with an old kerchief. “Never wanted to be creative enough.” Instead, he has taken on the monumental task of collecting of preserving songs, a historian, of sorts (an ethnomusicologist??). A talented musician with no taste for imagination, but a taste for the past, Werner played everything from guitar to banjo to accordion (a perennial favorite of mine) to the bones and spoons. He also pulled off a mean a cappella in the true style of traditional folk music. Not to mention one helluva Dancing Man.

At the break, Bob, my 90-year-old folky friend, was invited up to sing some hymns of his own. He addled up, slowly and steadily (I know men 20 years younger who can’t move half as well), with the world’s widest, little-boy grin on his grizzled face, he was even able to recall songs he wrote himself—in the Scottish, fisherman’s ditty style, I couldn’t tell the difference between old and new—years ago, all delivered in the simple, practiced timbre of his fisherman’s voice and Highland brogue. It was nostalgic, antique, almost eerie.

As Werner ascended the stage again, paying due homage to the living history found in Bob’s words, he provided the standard, “It’s great to be here” spiel and was reminded appropriately of a strategically-placed anecdote (folk singers are, first and foremost, storytellers). A couple of years ago, he went on stage in Indonesia and said, “Thanks guys, I’m just tickled to death to be here.” Well, he should have known better than to use cutesy American colloquialisms, as he admitted woefully. Even through a translator, “I scratch myself until I die” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.