Welcome to Folk and Bluegrass Songs for Fiddle. I’m Lauren Rioux. I’m a fiddler and music educator. Through the years of sharing hundreds of tunes with students and helping them build facility on their instrument through ear training, theory knowledge, and jamming skills, I began to notice a common hurdle for many intermediate and advancing fiddlers. Students would come to me and ask “What do I do when the jam moves beyond fiddle tunes? What happens when it’s time to play a solo on a song I don’t know?” 

And just to clarify, “tunes” are instrumental melodies. Most of the time they don’t have words. Someone might make up words to it after the fact, because people like to add stories to things to help them remember a feeling or story. Songs are melodies that start out with words ( lyrics). This means that the vocalist is the leader and the focus of the song, and the instrumentalists are there to support the story being told by the singer. 

Songs can present a unique challenge to someone who plays with a bow, because we can sustain our notes the way a vocalist does (as opposed to pickers, where the sound decays almost immediately after the string is hit). And if you’re coming from a fiddle-tune tradition where you’re usually the one playing the melody, and perhaps a little chording to give another player a moment to shine or adding a harmony on top of a melody, in this new setting your skills and usual role could put you in conflict with the singer’s sonic real estate. What you need to do instead is provide a powerful and supportive role for the delivery of the song.  

Another issue for many fiddlers who join a song circle is that keys are determined by the vocalist who is singing the song and their own vocal range. If you come from a fiddle-tune tradition, you almost always learn the tune in a particular key and then play it in that key for evermore. There are exceptions, of course, but this is usually how it goes. In the singing tradition, the singer sets the key, according to their vocal range. So you might learn a song in a particular key for one singer, but then sit down at another jam and hear it called in a totally different key by a different singer. Same song, same melody, same chord progression, but totally different notes. This can eliminate a lot of really wonderful fiddlers from participating in song circles and jams. 

Here’s where this course comes in. Folk and Bluegrass Songs for Fiddle is designed to help you repackage all the skills you’ve been building by playing fiddle tunes and show you how to make them work when you sit down to play a song. You’ll learn to craft solos through simple decision making—beginning gently with familiar fiddling techniques and adding more as you work through the songs. You’ll learn to add pickups, double stops, variations, licks, and fills to the melodies of the songs and you’ll learn each song in four different keys so you’ll be comfortable playing in whatever key a singer wants to sing in. We’ll tackle ten common American folk songs and we’ll use a popular fiddle tune as an etude to help discover and explore hand shapes in nine keys. The course focuses on learning fewer songs but in multiple keys so you can feel confident moving what you know in one familiar key to a new one. Every lesson includes Play-Along Tracks provided by Peghead co-founder and guitarist Scott Nygaard, as well as sheet music. 

If you’re familiar with my teaching through my site JamWithLauren.com, you’ll feel comfortable knowing that the theory and ear-training skills you’ve learned through that repertoire and curriculum will support you well here. I hope you’ll enjoy these songs and expanded skills and keys I’ve put together here for this collaboration with Peghead Nation. And if I’m a new face to Pegheads, I’m excited to meet you here and I encourage you to take a peek at my blog and books and lessons over at JamWithLauren.com for additional suggestions on how to express yourselves on this most beautiful instrument. Thank you for joining me here, and trusting me with your time. I believe in you. You can do this!