The 18th Old Fiddlers Convention is going on in Galax this week. For most of the people in Felts Park, it’s a vacation and a celebration, but for members of the Galax Moose lodge, it’s a lot of work and an important fundraiser – and one lodge member has been among the Moose managing the convention for half a century.
In the first week of August, tens of thousands of people with RVs, campers, tents and musical instruments descend on the City of Galax, population seven thousand fourteen. They’re continuing a tradition that began in the Galax High School auditorium in the spring of 1935, a fundraiser for the then-new Moose lodge. The convention long ago moved outdoors and expanded to fill a whole week. No one’s been with the convention since the start, but eighty-seven-year-old Oscar Hall has been there for a good long time.
“I’m Oscar Hall. I’ve been with the fiddler’s convention for fifty years, this makes, this year.”
When Hall started working at the convention, Lyndon Johnson was president of the United States and the Beatles were still a new sensation.
“There’s a lot of changes been in fifty years, in the style of music and everything, but I like to keep it traditional, myself. They try to get too fancy with some of it, you know. It don’t sound just right to me because I’m old fashioned.”
Hall collected money that first year, but eventually he got much more responsibility and led the Moose to create separate categories for bluegrass and old time competitors, and to add or revive instrument categories.
“Well, I just seen the way things ought to be done and I finally got my foot through the door and took advantage of it. Got to be the governor. I didn’t have but one vote, but I could make a lot of suggestions, you know.”
With power comes responsibility and Hall inherited a lot of responsibility for the fiddlers convention. Fortunately for him, he had a good partner, Larmie Hall, his wife of sixty-two years.
“They just brought everything and put it on the porch out there, them people that’s running it at that time, and said, “There it is. It’s yours.” We didn’t know what to do. She said, “I’ll try it.” Registered everybody by a pencil and she done it for eighteen years. She had her a place in there in that bedroom. She laid that legal pads, thirteen of them, down on the bed. She’d got to the post office every day and write it in.”
The last year Hall’s wife did that, she handled 2400 hundred registrations. She also kept track of the judges and scoring that determine who wins each category. But Larmie passed away in October.
“But I wasn’t out there that much last year on account of my wife. I had to look after her. I took her out there a couple of times. I shouldn’t have I don’t guess, but I knowed she wanted to go and I took her.”
When Larmie’s health began to slip, their daughter, Doris Brown, stepped in, working on registration and scorekeeping and helping her father stuff the nine hundred envelopes that get mailed out to competitors every year.
“If it hadn’t been for my daughter, I’d a done had to quit when my wife got so she wasn’t able to do it. But she growed up in it. She knowed what to do.”
Rumors said that Hall planned to quit after his fiftieth fiddlers convention. Now that the time has come, he seems to have changed his mind.
“I don’t know. Just depends on my health. Need to be doing something. Part of my life. I’m not going to give it up until I have to. I’m going to keep hammering as long as I can. I mean, that keeps me going.”
It’s important, Hall says, for the right kind of person to have his job.
“And you got to have somebody that run that thing over there and keep it going that’s interested in old time and bluegrass music. Because they’ve got to have a drive for the music to keep it alive and everything. You know, they don’t want to see our tradition die. They want to keep it going.”
Despite working at the Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax since 1965, Oscar Hall has never played music there. His connection to the music, however, goes back to the very first convention in 1935. Tim Thornton has more.
Oscar Hall has worked at the Old Fiddlers Convention for fifty years now, which means the first thirty conventions somehow managed without his help. Of course, before he started working there, he went as a spectator. Sometimes he was a spectator without going.
“When I worked in the milk plant, it was right across the railroad over there in Felts Park and could hear it. When I was working, I’d slip out and listen at it when it was going on, what time I was working there”
Before that, he played.
“We all tried to play a little music over there where I growed up next to Hillsville. My mother, she played a clawhammer banjo. My aunt did. My uncle, my daddy’s brother, he played the clawhammer banjo, Howard Hall. My Grandpaw Hall played the clawhammer banjo."
Hall used the money he made selling subscriptions to Grit to buy a Kay guitar.
“I got out of service, went up in Washington. My sister worked in the U.S. Treasury there and she got all of us a job. Billy Brumfield, he played a guitar and played a little in some of the bars up there. We done pretty good, I thought. That Jimmy Dean, you know, he was playing like that up there then. That was back in 1947, 1948.”
Hall’s sons, Dennis and Dallas, are carrying on the family tradition.
“The kids got old enough to play. I’d take them to the fiddlers convention and they wanted to get started too. Dennis wanted to start the New Ballard’s Branch Bog Trotters, the oldest boy.”
The band’s name is a tribute to a legendary old time group whose fiddler, Uncle Eck Dunford, lived in a cabin just up the creek from Hall’s house. His wife’s family know Uncle Eck well.
“But Uncle Eck, he passed away right after me and my wife was married. He was one of the original Bog Trotters. They had a pretty good band. They was the first band that won out at the fiddlers convention when they had it.”
Uncle Eck’s Bog Trotters won the band competition at the second fiddlers convention, too. The New Ballard’s Branch Bog Trotters have won the title eight times so far.
The 80th Old Fiddlers Convention going on in Galax this week is a family affair. Generations of musicians come to compete and jam. There’s even a youth contest for people younger than 16. But...the fiddlers’ convention hasn’t always been so domesticated.
This year’s Old Fiddlers Convention, the eightieth, goes through the early hours of August 9th. On Tuesday, August 4th, hundreds of mandolin players will gather in an attempt to break a world record.
