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“Normally there’s not many people
around here, so I usually have to play by myself,” said Ryder Cude, a
15 year old Texas fiddle player. “But every now and then, I can find a
jam session in Seymour or Knox City where I can go play with some
people.”
If you live in a small town, too small to have its own marching band or even it’s own junior high school, growing
musically can be tough, as well as lonely. Wade Goodwyn reports for NPR on a music camp for Western swing (that’s jazz with pointy toed boots and Stetsons) in a tiny Texs town.
The
Bobby Boatwright Memorial Music Camp, named for a hometown fiddler who
went on to make it professionally, is held in Goree, TX (pop. 320),
in what used to be the local junior high building.
As Goodwyn
explains, the camp is doing more than teach old fiddle tunes. Drawing
adults and youngsters from many small towns in the region, it’s a
revival meeting of cowboy culture and a celebration of family life on
the north Texas plains.
Says Tammy Trainham, wife of the mayor and prime mover behind the music camp, Goree ”was dead —
graveyard dead…We’re trying to rebirth a town.”