VENTURA COUNTY LIFE : Getting Picky With Good Friends and Fiddlers

For a place filled with folks I’d never met before, the Oak View Community Center was full of old friends.

Oh, the people were cordial enough--I had no sooner walked through the door with guitar in hand than I was intercepted by a woman with a big smile.

“I could use another guitarist and I’m up in about 15 minutes,” said Jan Bowman, nodding toward an array of microphones and speakers where a five-piece string band was performing a gospel-flavored bluegrass tune before a toe-tapping crowd. “Want to play?”

Sure, why not? I didn’t even need to ask what songs we’d do or in what key. Like I said, the place was full of old friends: songs I’ve heard and played since I was a kid in Florida.

That shared legacy and passion for music and fun are what keeps people coming to these twice-a-month picking parties of the California Old-Time Fiddlers Assn. The tradition has been going strong for 25 years.

Although the players shift constantly and the solos are never the same, very little else changes from session to session--or from year to year.

Not the songs. Most of them are bluegrass, country, gospel or pop standards dating back to radio days, their homespun melodies and bittersweet lyrics forever fresh because they simply ring true.

Not the instruments. Oh, there’s a shiny new Martin flattop here and there but most of the guitars, banjos, mandolins and fiddles show the wear of many decades, even generations, of loving caress.

Best of all, are the attitudes. There’s nothing hip or hostile here, either among the dozens who come to sit, listen and maybe turn a Texas two-step around the linoleum dance floor or among the equally large crowd of players who congregate in different corners of the sunny community center.

Out on the patio, one circle of players is harmonizing “The Tennessee Waltz,” spiced with some nice fiddle and mandolin solos; another circle lilts through a sweet version of “San Antonio Rose.”

In the game room, where the electrified players plug in, fiddler David Roine has parked his amp on top of an air hockey table and is adding fills and filigrees to Suz O’Brien’s singing of “Release Me.” Her bass guitar anchors the bottom, with electric guitar, honky-tonk piano and a few acoustic guitars rounding out the sound. Then Roine fires things up with a lively “Jambalaya.” A few dancers, mostly on the far side of 70, swirl and dip to the beat.

“This is kind of like what community used to be,” says Karen Kaminsky, a regular from Meiners Oaks.

The sessions attract all ages. At the annual competition, kids so little their instruments look huge perform careful renditions of traditional tunes like “Cotton-Eyed Joe” or “Soldier’s Joy.” The association includes a family band from Camarillo made up of dad, mom and three kids--all first-rate bluegrass pickers.

And here comes Stanley Henney, 94, dressed to impress in sky-blue sport coat and 11-gallon hat. He’ll dance with every gal in the place before the afternoon is over.

“When I dance with him I have to tell him, ‘Now, Stanley, don’t twirl me out’,” says Rae Huffman, a fine fiddler and club regular who is significantly younger than Henney but past her jitterbug years.

Kaminsky recalls the afternoon some young buck asked Henney at what age a man loses interest in sex.

“I don’t know, son,” he replied. “You’ll have to ask somebody older than me!”

The focal point of the get-togethers is the stage area at one end of the gym. Ranks of metal folding chairs face the mikes. Whenever a group has a couple of tunes ready for public consumption, they sign up for a turn in the figurative spotlight. Sometimes the arrangements are polished and tight; other times, the most charitable adjective might be enthusiastic.

“The people here are completely supportive of anybody who’s willing to take the risk,” Kaminsky says.

And that is truly welcome news because Jan Bowman, now armed with a Yamaha 12-string, is giving me the high sign. We’re on. I grab my old Gibson and sidle up to an unoccupied mike.

Bowman, who I will later learn is chapter president, greets the crowd warmly and gives her ad hoc band--consisting of two guitars, fiddle, string bass and drums--our first cue: “ ‘Make the World Go Away,’ key of Dog.”

She plays and sings it pure and strong. The rest of us click into something resembling a groove, with fiddler Dave Barker--a former Nevada state champ--taking a couple of highflying solos. Then we cruise through a bouncy “My Blue Heaven” and have fun with the choo-choo rhythms of “Folsom Prison Blues.” Dancers dance, toe-tappers toe-tap, and before I know it, we’re waving so long and the next group is taking over.

Bowman says the Ventura County chapter--District 8 out of 22 statewide--has 318 members. Each pays 10 bucks a year for a newsletter, these sessions and the occasional potluck dinner. A flock of association members performed at the recent Ventura County Fair, and she says the club can always scare up a band for any organization that wants live music at a reasonable price.

Back out on the patio, guitar player Ches Willis and his banjo-picking buddy Truman Bridges relax with another gospel tune. The picking partners have a combined age of 150, and Willis says they have been playing together for 50 years.

“I have no idea how many songs we know,” he says. “We played one gig that ran 7 1/2 hours and never repeated a one.”

Bridges, of Santa Paula, tells a familiar tale: “When I was growing up in Missouri, we had no radio or TV but we had an old banjo and an old guitar. The tradition in my family was that when you got married, you’d quit this nonsense and go to work.”

He grins.

“I’m sort of the black sheep. I kept playing.”

That’s the spirit at work here: Keep playing. Keep enjoying. Keep living life as if it were an appreciated gift. Don’t just stare at some glowing screen all day and night--put your brain and fingers to work and make some joyful noise.

Music with the California Old-Time Fiddlers Assn., 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. on the second and fourth Sundays of each month at the Oak View Community Center, 18 Valley Road, Oak View. Free admission. For information, call 642-3422.

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Doug Adrianson can be reached at [email protected].