“The Eighth of January” is an old fiddle tune. It’s the first substantial tune of any kind I ever picked out by ear. I was 14 and had been playing the banjo a few months. I stumbled upon the first 5 notes or so purely by accident, happened to recognize the melody, and was off to the races. “The Eighth of January” is the tune “The Battle of New Orleans” is set to. (I’m not sure, but I think the original tune, “Eighth of January”, actually commemorates the battle.) The fiddle tune is just played much faster.
Looking back on it, the banjo was another of the strange twists my life has taken. It was an odd choice for a city boy whose first 15 years were spent in a house almost devoid of music. (Sadly, this was true both literally and figuratively.) My absentee father had long since exposed me to music and I was fooling around with playing by the time I was 10. Playing music, though, wasn’t “just something we did” in my mother’s household. The banjo-blame lies squarely with Dad’s younger brother, who was an accomplished banjoist and took the time to point me in the right direction. Dad was also a culprit. He bought me a banjo. Additionally, I’d been to my first Bluegrass festival that summer and seen the great Bill Monroe on one his “on” occasions. I’d been to a few rock concerts prior to that, but rock-n-roll is largely devoid of the virtuosity and power that is commonplace in Bluegrass. Monroe’s show had a profound affect on me and still ranks among the very best I’ve ever seen in any musical genre.
Digging deeper, I believe a desire to please my father was instrumental in my taking up the banjo. He didn’t push me that way, but I knew it would meet with his approval, and approval was something I was desperate for at 14. Additionally, it provided me the opportunity to become “good at something”, and I was desperate for that too. I frequently practiced as much as eight hours a day the first couple of years I was learning to play. That was when my obsessive-compulsive tendency first reared its head. It’s also when I realized the secret to most anything worth doing in life is putting in the time to become good at it. A desire to excel at music was one of the things I used to justify my leaving my mother’s house and moving 400 miles away to live with my father when I was 15. The banjo shaped my future in both dramatic and subtle ways.
