About
Old-time music is handmade music, heard on porches, in living rooms, at dances at the VFW, by the dim glow of campfire light.
As a privately-educated Catholic Hapa kid living in the San Francisco Bay Area I heard none of this music growing up. (Or what I did hear of it I didn’t understand.)
And as with many pre-digital traditional arts, many of old-time music’s finest practitioners have passed on. Others are too old to tour. Still others remain fiercely attached to the methods of folk tradition: sharing one-to-one or one-to-few.
Much of own my exposure to and discovery of the music has been mediated by technology spanning place and time: vinyl, CD, video, mp3. As one of the founders of the San Francisco Bluegrass & Old-Time Festival (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003), I developed a film series that highlighted the ability of audiovisual recordings to help sustain the art form.
This blog is my place to use the internet in service of the same.
— Chris Ereneta, 2010
