This article very nearly failed to exist.  The weather did not seem to favor us in the endeavor as the concert was twice rescheduled due to snow from its original date of January 30 before finally taking place on March 7.  However, when the day of the show did come, the weather was gorgeous.  It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, the kind that's best spent listening to live music.  To be honest, I think all days are best spent listening to live music, but this one particularly so.  The show was put on by the Richmond Folk Music Society as part of their yearly concert series showcasing traditional folk music.  The series takes place at Congregation Or Ami on Richmond's Southside.  It was the perfect environment for this particular show.  One whole wall of the room was a giant window looking out on a beautiful little pond with some trees around it, giving the feeling that we were sitting out on the porch.  Which is the perfect environment for some good old-time fiddle music.

And we were in for some exceptionally good fiddlin'. If you are a fan of fiddle, as I am, and have not heard of Mark Campbell, you're really missing out.  He's won all sorts of fiddle competitions including Clifftop, the Virginia State Fair, and the West Virginia State Folk Festival, but he's not just good at fiddle. He has won the West Virginia State Folk Festival's banjo competition as well.  To top that, in 2008 the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities named him a master fiddler.  It's not often that you meet a true master of a particular art form, and even rarer when that art form is one of your favorites.  Old time fiddle does just happen to be one of my favorite forms of music, so you can imagine how much I was looking forward to this show.

On this particular occasion Mark was playing with his wife, Marty Gravett, and two daughters, Mauren and Molly Campbell, also known as the Campbell Family Band.  Coming into the afternoon, I had no real expectations about the band, but I was pleasantly surprised, not only by the individual musical talents of Mark's family, but by the cohesiveness with which the band played.  In retrospect I feel that this cohesiveness makes a good deal of sense.  They are, after all, a family band.  With the lovely view of the pond out the glass wall, it really did feel like we had been invited out to the Campbell family back porch for an afternoon of pickin' and bowin'.

I've already mentioned the many accolades that Mark has won over the years, so it hardly needs telling that he was the star of the show.  But his playing talents weren't the only thing he brought to the performance.  He is a veritable encyclopedia of information about old-time music from Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky.  The band played songs in sets of two or three, and before each set Mark would tell the story behind each of the tunes, or at least a story about the band to which the tune was attributed.  My favorite of these was a story about Edden Hammons of West Virginia who, while in jail for "revenuing," as Mark puts it, was offered five bucks by another inmate to escape.  The thought being that he would be caught, have time added to his sentence, and the jail would have a fiddler on hand well into the future.

Mark wasn't the only Campbell showcasing a good deal of talent.   Both of his daughters are fine musicians.   Molly can pick the banjo almost as well as her father, which is saying a lot.  And Mauren has the perfect voice for the style of music they were playing: very light and fair, but with a slight twang.  Marty also was in fine form, playing the churchbass, a cello played as a standup bass.  In addition to the family, the band was also joined on some songs by Jan Williamson on washtub bass and Glenn Amy replacing Marty on churchbass while she clogged.

This show was everything that I had hoped it would be, and proved my theory that live music is the best possible way to spend a Sunday afternoon.  So get out there and check out Mark Campbell, the Campbell Family Band, and the Richmond Folk Music Society.  You won't regret the drive down to the southside.

richmondfolkmusic.com

markcampbelloldtimefiddle.com

 

By Editing Department, Regional Editor and Author: Robin Marschak

Robin Marschak was born and raised in Richmond, but has only recently moved back after two years in California.  He loves all types of music from Jimmy Rodgers to Daft Punk to Tower of Power and all things in between.  He is currently a student at VCU and living in Oregon Hill.  Some of his favorite artists include Old Crow Medicine Show, Mark Campbell, and Steve Earl.  Other than listening to music and writing, Robin's hobbies include eating, sleeping, and an occasional guilt induced fit of exercise.  You can follow his adventures in local music on Twitter @robinmarschak, or hear some of the non-local music that he enjoys at either last.fm/user/beerdo231 or blip.fm/beerdo.

Please login to post your comments.