Old-Time Fiddling Festival in Tune With Rural Setting

Contenders vying for the modest prizes offered in the annual Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention, taking place Sunday at Goleta’s idyllic Stow House, must be aware of the history of the songs they crank up. Music is the real point at the annual fall ritual, of course, but rules are rules, and any song must be at least 50 years old to qualify.

Although 50 years may seem like a long time, as of this year that figure is only twice the age of the convention itself. Twenty-five years ago, bluegrass and traditional-American-music champion Peter Feldmann staged the first event at the UC Santa Barbara lagoon, providing a full day of bluegrass and other archival American folk music.

Over the years, the convention has moved about, landing on the ample and picturesque grounds of Stow House a dozen years back. It’s a happy, historic venue for an old-time music festival, sporting a carefully preserved Victorian house, a relocated train depot and other concentrated accouterments of old-world rural Goleta.

Despite the general love of things acoustic and Appalachian at the convention, musicians who flock here from all over California and beyond are a diverse bunch. I was a teenage contestant at the fiddlers’ convention, trying my hand at flat-picked guitar, while my banjoist brother, David, claw-hammered his way into the audience’s collective heart.

We played tunes such as “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and the then-popular “Dueling Banjos,” the giddiest moment in the otherwise grim depiction of backwoods, heart-of-darkness Americana from the film “Deliverance.” That touch of Hollywood topicality alone made us suspicious among the old-time purists. But David, a mere sprout of 9 or 10 at the time, won us points for his fresh-faced youthfulness.

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The infectious good cheer and historical grit of this music can become an obsession, or a way of life, as it did for the convention’s founder. Feldmann, of Swiss descent, came to UCSB as a student in 1958 and had a growing fascination with traditional American music.

“The music just hit me like a ton of bricks,” Feldmann said, from his home in Santa Ynez. “I didn’t know much about this country and wanted to learn about it. To me, the folk musics, including blues and early jazz and bluegrass, became a good way for me to learn about and get a feeling for the national character. There was just something about that music that really struck a chord in me. I didn’t want to just learn about it from reading a book. I wanted to participate in it, so I started to learn these different instruments.”

He began learning how to play the music and also began a long career in presenting the music. “I realized there was no organization at UCSB that put on concerts of traditional American music. I decided to go ahead and form one, which became the Old Time Music Front. Those were the days when there were a lot of political organizations, and a lot of front organizations, so I thought I would do a front organization and be very insidious, to actually subvert the youth of America by exposing them to their own music.”

Once he left UCSB, Feldmann toured with a group. Then, wanting to settle down and raise a family, he opened the legendary Bluebird Cafe in Santa Barbara, patterned after the Ash Grove in Los Angeles. Now that his family is grown--son Misha is a bassist whose band Summercamp recently signed a contract with the Maverick label--Feldmann plans to devote more time to playing music himself. But he still spearheads the Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention every year.

The origins of Santa Barbara’s gathering can be traced back to another long-standing Southern California bluegrass event, the Topanga Canyon Banjo and Fiddle Contest, these days held each spring at Paramount Ranch. In 1970, outdoor concerts were banned in the aftermath of the tragic Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, where one person was killed.

Desperate to find a stomping ground, the organizers of the San Fernando Valley event appealed to Feldmann. He took the case to UCSB, which was not affected by Santa Barbara’s own music ban. “After hemming and hawing and fudging, I actually got the thing moved up there, and the people at the university liked it so much that they approached me a year later and said, ‘Can you start something like that for us?’ ”

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A quarter of a century later, the convention is one of the sturdier cultural traditions in the area, even though Feldmann still views traditional American music as an underground culture.

“You know, it’s still sort of a front organization,” Feldmann said. “I’m still a subversive. I have these ulterior motives. I just want to have these musicians meet each other and have a good time playing.”

Although it is a fiddlers’ convention, and there are competitions in fiddle and banjo and other instruments, and singing, the prizes are very small. The whole idea is not so much that it’s a competition, but it gives people an excuse to spend a day in jam sessions.

Let the jam begin--again.

DETAILS

* WHAT: The 25th Annual Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention.

* WHEN: 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday.

* WHERE: Stow House, 304 N. Los Carneros Road, Goleta.

* HOW MUCH: Tickets are $8 adults; $5 seniors and students; $3 children 12 and under.

* CALL: 962-0830.