A somewhat forgotten footnote these days, string bands in their time were an indispensable part of rural community life, and these bands were particularly suited for live shows, rattling off reels, quicksteps, and waltzes for dances where the only rule was to move your feet. Within that framework, however, there was room for variety, including galloping gallows confessions (like Kelly Harrell’s “Charles Guiteau,” the first-person story of the man who assassinated U.S. President James Garfield in 1881, complete with fiddle blasts from the great Posey Rorer), surrealistic lyrics (try making literal sense of any version of “Cotton-Eyed Joe”), and country blues lyrics dressed up with fiddles and banjos — whatever worked, as long as you could hear it across the room or yard and dance to it. Often the songs were fitted with floating verses that allowed the bands to shorten or lengthen a tune to fit the dancefloor flow, and the best of these bands could turn as one on a dime, and being acoustic, they could literally play anywhere, anytime, and for as long as needed.

Several historical elements surfaced to shoulder the string band tradition to the sidelines, including the rise of personable country crooners like Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Acuff, Gene Autry, and Jimmie Davis, and the development of live amplified sound, which allowed individual instruments to take center stage, upsetting the ensemble balance that was at the heart of these wonderful old bands. At the point where rock & roll and bluegrass burst on the scene, both born from and given appeal by the advent of amplification, veteran string bands either made the switch or found their gigs diminish. Something of the spirit of the string band survives in modern bluegrass, but no bluegrass band has ever been as wild, wooly, loose, and explosive as the old fashioned string bands from the 1920s and 1930s, the best of which were as kinetic as a bunch of kids chasing chickens, with loose-limbed fiddle runs exploding at every turn. Different eras, different chickens, different kids…Everybody’s still dancing, though.