Walk into the Tractor Tavern at around 7 p.m. on the second Monday of the month, before the square dancing begins, and you’ll see a circle of chairs on the dance floor. To anyone familiar with the old-timey players in town, there should be a few familiar faces, most notably that of fiddler Joe Fulton, banjoist Charlie Beck, and guitarist/clogger Charmaine Slaven. The three players have been together for a few years, but they’ve firmly rooted themselves in the local Appalachian revival scene as the Tallboys.
I guess the point of this preshow picking ring is that anyone who wants to can join in some old-time pickin’ and a-singin’. Old men in Christmas sweaters sawed on their fiddles, young pseudo-hippies strummed along like they’d just heard the Old & In the Way album, and the core of the Tallboys—Fulton, Beck, and Slaven—proved they were the ones demanding of the most respect.
Like the Old Crow Medicine Show or the Hackensaw Boys, the Tallboys play old-time hillbilly music that is skilled but not polished, raw but beautiful. So many hillbilly revivalists tend to speed up the melodies or drown the tunes in too-slick picking. But the Tallboys take their time. They have no use for flashy fills, and they play their tunes very nimbly, not rigidly as if they had just learned “Arkansas Sawyer” from a Mel Bay book.
I’ve been a fan of the Tallboys ever since I caught fiddler Joe Fulton on the corner of Pine Street in the Pike Place Market. There he sat, all by his lonesome on an overturned bucket, sawing out classic hillbilly fiddle numbers with an Irish swing to them. He was dressed in a baggy T-shirt and had a full-on beard and eyes that made him look permanently baked. Maybe he is stoned all the time; I wouldn’t know, but the boy sure can play a tune.
I watched him for a bit, threw some bills into his fiddle case, and walked on. I had no idea he played with Beck and Slaven, but when I caught them at the Conor Byrne last year, I was glad he did. Good musicians are hard to come by. It’s even harder to find ones you connect with. What was really spectacular about their performances at the Tractor’s pick-a-thon was noticing the chemistry between the three. When a nonmember of the band tore into “Indian War Whoop,” everyone followed suit just fine, but when Fulton lit into “Turkey in the Straw,” Beck and Slaven knew just the right places to fill in or pick up the lead. And while it’s a nice gesture (not to mention the Appalachian way) to invite other pickers to the party, the ring belonged to the Tallboys.
My only complaint is that Ms. Slaven refrained from tapping out the rhythms with her clog-dancing routine. Instead, that was left up to a few patrons sipping beer in back of the club. However, their clogging was entertaining for the wrong reasons; people who don’t know how to clog properly just look like Yosemite Sam throwing a temper tantrum.
Opening Act is a weekly look at a band you didn’t go to see but saw anyway—because they played before the band you went to see (and were maybe even better).
