Genuine question from a French musician who plays old time music. How do people from the region actually think about regional musical styles? Is "Appalachian music" a meaningful category to you, or is it too broad to mean anything specific?
Are there distinctions within the region that outsiders never get right?
I'm a French banjo player, been deep into old time for a few years now. Getting a gourd banjo made at the moment which feels like a point of no return.
I keep running into the regional question when I try to learn tunes properly. Like, does it actually matter to you where a tune comes from?
Is the Appalachian / Ozarks / Texas distinction something you think about when you play, or is it more of an academic thing that doesn't really affect how you approach a tune?
And within those big regions, are there smaller distinctions that actually matter in practice? Would a musician from eastern Kentucky say their style is meaningfully different from western North Carolina?
Asking because I'm trying to add a regional origin field to a tune database I'm building, and I'd rather get it right from people who actually play than make assumptions from the outside.
sallysgarden.net if you're curious about what I'm building.
Hey everyone,
I've been playing old time for a few years and always found myself digging through YouTube tabs, scattered PDFs and forum threads trying to find different versions of the same tune. So I built something to scratch my own itch and figured I'd share it here before going further.
Sally's Garden is a community database for old time tunes (and Appalachian music more broadly). The idea is simple:
- Search for a tune by name (or alias because we all know Cripple Creek has twelve names)
- Browse different versions contributed by the community, ranked by likes
- Filter by instrument and tuning (Cross-G fiddle, Double-C banjo, DADGAD guitar, etc.)
- Contribute your own version either an audio upload or a YouTube link
- Mark tunes as "I know this one" to build your personal repertoire
- See what tunes you have in common with another musician when you visit their profile
There's also a jam session tool you create an ephemeral session (24h), share a link or QR code, everyone joins and the app calculates in real time which tunes the most people in the circle know. Useful when you show up to a pickup jam and aren't sure what everyone plays.
The app is called Sally's Garden, it's free, no ads, mobile-first (usable with one hand while the other holds a bow).
I'm not trying to replace The Session or any existing resource this is specifically built around the old time repertoire and the jam session culture.
Honest question for this community: does this solve a real problem for you? What's missing? What would make you actually open this on your phone at a festival?
All feedback welcome brutal honesty especially. This is early and I'd rather fix it now than after.
PS: the database is pretty empty right now, that's kind of the point of this post. I'm counting on this community to bring it to life, one tune at a time
