This episode dives into the layered, living tradition of old time music with local musician and filmmaker Clara Riedlinger. Clara breaks down how old time is less a strict genre and more a cultural stew—blending European, African, and Indigenous influences into something deeply communal. We talk about how the music is passed along not through sheet music, but by ear, by memory, and by hanging out—people teaching each other tunes in kitchens, on porches, and at jam circles. Clara shares how she found her way into the scene, and why old time isn’t just about the music, but the people who keep it alive. It’s an episode about community, tradition, and why you don’t need to read music to play it.

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Foreign.

Hi and welcome to Nights and Weekends, the Sounds podcast about change makers in our local community.

My name is Kate Rogers.

I'm here with co host Virginia Wood.

And today we're talking to Clara Riedlinger, who is a local musician in the old time music community and a filmmaker.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Kate and Virginia for having me.

I'm excited to be here and have this conversation.

Yes, we're so excited to have you here.

It's an interesting topic we're going to talk about today.

We typically talk about more rock, indie rock, matrix, mainstream genres.

And today we're talking about old time music.

And I personally don't know a lot about it.

So could you give me a little 101 about what old time music is and your role in it in our community?

Yeah, totally.

So the sort of elevator pitch description of what old time music is is that.

And of course it's way more complex than what I'm about to say.

But the simplified version is that old time music is one of the oldest post colonial forms of American folk music that combines the musical traditions of European, African and indigenous people to create a new musical tradition that could only have existed in what became the United States because that's where those cultures were mixing together.

Interesting.

So how does that translate to what you're doing and what is happening with old time music in Rochester?

Yeah, so I guess this gets maybe into more of the complexities of old time music.

So this really is what people describe as back porch music.

So it's music that you make with your friends and families in your community, at home or maybe out at a bar, there might be a jam or something like that.

And I got into old time music when I was living in Baltimore.

I went to get a drink with a friend at a bar and all of a sudden these people came in with instruments, sat down.

It didn't seem like they were a band.

They weren't a formal group.

It was just some people in the neighborhood that came together to play these tunes.

And when I moved back home, I really missed that environment and having other people to play music with and particularly having other people to learn from.

So what's really essential to this music is that it's an oral tradition.

The tunes that we play are not written down or notated.

Sometimes they are.

People have tried to, but you can't really learn a fiddle tune from a piece of sheet music and play it authentically.

You have to learn it how they say knee to knee with another person.

And I was really missing that community when I moved back.

So I sought it out and I found a little bit of it.

But it was mostly people in their 70s and 80s, which is great, and I've learned a ton from those people as well.

But I was really craving younger people, my friends, my peers to play music with.

And I had been in the indie rock scene also for a long time, and I was just kind of lost on how do I get those people to play music with me?

So I started my own jam sessions out of my.

Just out of my living room.

And then some other people heard me playing.

I went to buy a new fiddle bow at a violin shop called Paint and Violins, that's in the Anderson Arts Building.

And it turned out that the owner, Sam, is a huge fan of old time music, which is not usually what I encounter in the classical violin world when I have to cross that bridge.

And him being so into it, he was like, I really want to have an old time jam here.

Will you lead it?

So I started leading a jam there on first Fridays, sort of looping in with the rest of the Anderson Arts Building so that everybody who was going to visit the artist studios would also walk through this old time jam and maybe have that same experience that I had had in Baltimore.

Just going to this bar and seeing the music in public in my community and saying, like, I want to get involved in that.

So I hope that answers your question.

I kind of went in a bunch of different places.

No, totally.

I have so many questions.

Right back at you.

So so basically you.

You play fiddle and when you were in Baltimore, you saw a group of musicians playing and you were like, I play fiddle.

Or did you play at that point?

Or what was your background at that point?

Yeah, so it starts all the way back here in Rochester.

So I grew up here in Rochester, and when I was really, really little, like 3 and 4, I took Suzuki lessons at the Hochstein School right downtown.

And then when I was in grade school, I did, you know, orchestra through middle school and early high school.

I was so bad at it, I never learned to read music.

The whole Suzuki thing when you're a little kid is that it's all by ear, right?

So I had some ear training and I'd also been in church choir my entire life.

And I had stopped playing violin in high school because I wasn't good at it.

I was sitting next to people whose parents were in the RPO or were professors at Eastman or just had really high expectations for their children, and they were all really, really Good.

And it just felt totally unattainable for me.

And.

And I didn't really enjoy playing classical music, so I quit.

But it was a huge regret because I actually really loved playing music.

And when I was in Baltimore, I didn't have any instruments with me.

I had never owned an instrument as a kid.

My parents never bought one.

We always rented.

And I just kind of was like, I know where to put my fingers.

When I heard the music being played, I felt like it was already in me.

And my grandparents and my parents had always listened to country music and, like, a lot of folk revival, like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger kind of stuff, like, folksy stuff.

And so I was already a little bit familiar with the general sound and the instrumentation of, like, fiddle, banjo, guitar, bass.

So hearing that music just felt really comforting and, like, very immediately accessible to me.

Like, just watching them play, I thought I could sit next to those people and figure it out.

So I kind of just put it out into the universe, started telling people, hey, I want a fiddle.

I want to play the fiddle.

I want to join this jam.

And, you know, through the grapevine, somebody heard that I was looking for a fiddle.

It was a banjo player.

And they were like, I don't play the fiddle.

This was my dad's.

You can have it as long as you keep playing.

So that is how I got my first fiddle when I was 20.

And that was just mine, you know, not like a children's rental student instrument.

And after that, I moved back to Rochester.

I found a teacher, and that teacher was fine, but not the best fit for me.

What really changed things was then when I.

During the pandemic and everything shut down, and I had known that there were these, like, music camps, fiddle camps, banjo camps that you could go to and study with master artists who were, you know, tradition bearers, culture bearers that would teach you their music or their family's music or their.

You know, you would get to study with them.

But I thought that was so out of reach, I could never afford to go to that.

I could never take the time off work.

And then when everything was on lockdown, one of these camps did, like, a virtual camp program.

And it was three weeks long, and each week was a different theme, and I just.

And it was, pay what you can.

So I just said, I'm gonna pay $10.

I have this fiddle.

I am gonna take some classes with these musicians that I'm a fan of already.

Like, I will never get this otherwise.

And I just immediately clicked with the person who eventually became my mentor now, and that person I did zoom lessons with for a long time.

And then they started bringing me around to different fiddle camps and conventions and events and sort of getting me in the scene.

So that was really how I learned, I guess, was I just showed up to things.

I showed up to a lot of things and played with a lot of different people.

A lot of people who are way, way better than me.

And I still try to do that as much as possible.

So that's kind of the background.

Like, I did play when I was a kid, but I was horrible at it.

So you had a musical ear.

And I think, like, that's what is a problem for a lot of people.

They learn differently.

And you're put into one way of playing and learning, and it doesn' necessarily fit.

And so you had this love of music, and then you found your match on how to play it.

It sounds like, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I still.

I don't read music.

I, like, maybe could figure it out, but I don't know anything about classical music theory.

I could not tell you how to make a D7 chord on the guitar or what the notes are in that, but I know how to play, like, 1, 4, 5, 2, 6 chord.

Like, I can tell you all the numbers and where my hands go and what it sounds like, and I can sing the intervals to you because I can just hear it.

But that has taken a lot of practice, too.

I.

I wouldn't want anyone to hear this and think that they need to have a musical ear.

Like, that came to me through exposure and, like, very deep listening.

No, that's so interesting.

And one thing I wanted to bring up is you brought me this beautiful songbook that you had compiled.

And when I looked at it, my musician brain automatically said, where's the music?

Where's the sheet music?

Where are the actual notes?

Because when you told me what it was, I expected to see something different when I opened it.

And just for everyone listening, the book is a beautifully compiled book of lyrics.

I felt kind of stupid asking you at the beginning, but I was like, what.

What is this?

Just because, you know, thinking about, you know, the way you'd played music traditionally is you'd open a book, you'd see the sheet music, the lyrics, and then you'd continue to play it.

So what.

How.

I guess that's the most interesting part of this to me is.

I mean, there's lots of interesting parts, but my question for you is, like, what does that mean?

Like, is that.

Is that a tradition to compile Songbooks from different.

From different places you visited or different people that you've jammed with?

Yeah, totally.

Oh, I wish I had brought more of them.

And I actually did.

When you said, well, the traditional way is that you would read the music.

And I'm like, no, the traditional way.

The traditional way is that I would sing something to you and you would sing it back to me, you know, and I'm like trying to think off the bat, like, oh, I should do some kind of call and response song.

But like, that really is the most traditional way of, like, you do what I do.

And then eventually now you have that too, and you'll put your own spin on it, and then you'll go sing it to somebody else, and then they'll have their way of singing it that they learned from you.

And that's how the tradition gets passed on.

But people have been writing down the lyrics for a very long time.

There's this amazing family near Brant Lake, New York, the Cleveland family, that I've learned a lot of songs from.

The woman.

Now, Colleen Cleveland is the granddaughter of a woman named Sarah Cleveland.

And her grandmother had come from Scotland and settled in the Adirondacks and knew hundreds of songs that Sarah then hand wrote out and then taught to her daughter and Colleen, her granddaughter.

And then Colleen has taught some of them to me as well.

So that, like, effort of writing them down, a lot of it is just to help the singer memorize it, you know, like, that's why I started making the song books, because I was writing things down to help remember all the lyrics.

And then I figured if I'm going to write these all down anyways, I might as well share them.

But they pretty much never have music in them unless it's a church hymnal.

And even a lot of those don't have music in them.

You have to just listen to the people around you.

And when I play with classical musicians, that's something that I see them really struggle with, that I idea of just like listening to the people around you and responding to that rather than just looking at what's dictated to you on the page or what's notated on the page.

Yeah.

So I would say yes, very traditional to have a songbook with just lyrics in it.

You have to go find the person to sing it to you.

It just opens up this whole level of creativity and expression too.

Because I think based on, you know, the way you want to express that too, is like really cool part of that.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think the important thing that I would want to get across is that it requires you to go out into the world and interact with the other people around you.

And it requires you to listen to those people.

And I think that that is such an invaluable lesson for life in general, regardless of whether you're going to apply it to music or not.

You know, I'm applying it to music because that's the lens that I see the world through, that I interact with the world through.

But I mean, it could be about anything related to building community or like how to be a person in the world.

You have to go out and interact with other people and you have to listen.

Yeah, definitely.

I think that's the most important thing, like you said, and that's kind of what our mission is here, is to, you know, get.

Inspire people to get out and experiment with things and see new music, meet new people.

And especially with this art form.

It's just that's.

I take back what I said about, you know, not being traditional, but this is.

Is where music originated from.

Right.

Like this is the way people passed on songs and traditions and music together.

Yeah.

And I also think like a lot of the values that I have seen in like the punk community and the indie rock community where people are really interested in building community.

I've said, now I've said the word community like a thousand times.

I'm like getting self got to that.

But people talk about, you know, building community or making political change and all of those values are baked into the form of old time music.

I really strongly feel that old time is the most punk thing that anybody could do.

And anyone who thinks they're too cool for old time is wrong.

You're opening so many eyes right now.

I mean, I think like when you hear old time, like you think of like not what you're talking about.

Yeah.

I mean the name is not doing it any favors.

It has a little bit of a marketing problem.

Yes.

But like, like a lot of people will call it string band music instead.

But that also opens a whole can of worms because I was joking with you guys earlier about like people getting upset about when they have drums in old time music.

People who want to hold really tightly onto their idea of tradition.

But there have actually always been drums in old time music because black people contributed to it and brought African drums over.

And that music is part of this too, like in its core.

And indigenous people play drums.

You know, there was a time that drums, particularly African drums, were outlawed in the colonies.

And that was where the removal of drums in old Time came from.

But if you listen to Irish music, there's tons of drums in that and a lot of the tunes that we play in old time music, the melody came from Irish music too.

So like, I don't know, that whole idea of like holding on really tightly to a particular kind of instrumentation or a particular way of playing a tune, I personally don't think that that is the tradition.

For me, the most quote unquote traditional thing about it is actually the form of communication.

The idea that we are going to sit down, maybe not knowing each other, having never played music together.

And you know, I can say this is what key we're playing in.

And you can hear the chord changes.

And you know, if you're playing guitar generally in old time music, that's a rhythm instrument.

So I know that I can just trust the guitar player to keep a beat and I'm going to follow that beat as the fiddle player and play the melody over it.

Like it doesn't matter exactly what the instrumentation is as long as the rhythm is there and the communication between the musicians is there.

Yeah, that's a beautiful thing.

And I think we're gonna take a break now, but when we come back, Virginia, and Virginia, who dabbles in old time music herself, is gonna talk to you about just that and how that comes together, playing with each other and what that looks like here in Rochester.

So we will be right back on nights and weekends.

Welcome back to nights and weekends.

We are here with Clara Riedlinger and we are talking about old time music.

We wanted to dive into kind of what the, what the old time music scene looks like here in Rochester.

And so if someone were to go to an old time music jam, what could they expect to see?

Well, could range in size.

So I will say instrumentation wise, usually you are going to see a fiddle and a banjo would be the most basic old time jam.

You know, there's some solo fiddle and solo banjo stuff too, but you know, the core of it is fiddle and banjo and then it will throw a guitar in there and sometimes a bass more and more frequently.

Also I'm seeing cellos come up.

Depending on regions, this could vary too.

Like in a lot of the Northeast you'll see pianos and keyboards, sometimes an accordion, whereas in Appalachia you're usually not going to see that they won't have pianos and.

Yeah, so generally fiddle, banjo, guitar, bass are the core sort of elements of it.

With a fiddle being the main melody instrument, guitar and bass providing the rhythm and filling out the chords and then Banjo is sort of in between a rhythm and melody instrument where if you just have fiddle and banjo together, the banjo is really emphasizing the backbeat.

And that's kind of really the sound of old time music as compared to other forms of traditional music.

Is that emphasis on the.

And like 1 and 2 and, you know, kind of thing.

And that's what kind of really drives it as dance music, because, you know, that's an important factor for this too, is that the function of old time music in most cases is that it's dance music, you know, for square dances or contra dances or, you know, community dances in general.

Flat footing, whatever.

If you go to a jam, you will likely see a couple of fiddlers or a fiddle player and a guitar player, or a fiddler and a banjo player sitting really, really close, knee to knee together.

And then expanding out from that, you'll have maybe some of the less experienced players who are just trying to listen in and learn and hear the other people around them.

And it can be as small and tight as, you know, four people just on those core instruments, up to 30 or 50 or 100 people, and everyone is playing the same tune together.

There are no breaks or solos like you would have with bluegrass music, where there's a little bit more of a jazz influence, where, you know, they're playing in funny keys and kind of going all over the place, playing really fast.

And then maybe somebody will step forward, the other people fall back and that person will take a solo and then they'll step back and the next person will solo.

That doesn't happen in old time music.

It's much more about the trance state that you get into when you're playing the same thing over and over again.

And eventually that leads to other forms of improvisation that are responding to the melody.

So you might play a harmonic line on the fiddle part, but you're.

The other players are going to keep playing while you do that.

It's not like you're taking a crazy guitar solo to show off.

It's all in service of the tune of playing together.

So I guess that's.

That's what you would see.

You'd see a large circle with expanding rings of musicians all playing the same thing together.

Since I'm learning clawhammer, you've made it very approachable through the first Friday's events and then you have the newsletter.

You've also had different artists come through town from different areas that bring different types of old time music to the area.

There was that show at Skylark, which was amazing.

So I Just wanted you to talk maybe a little bit about how you're making it approachable for younger generations, whether it be like people like me in their 30s or younger even.

Yeah, totally.

I really want to create opportunities for people to have the same experience that I had that I mentioned in Baltimore, where it was just out in the world in my community and I accidentally happened upon it.

So I'm trying to create as many situations as possible for other people to encounter old time music in the wild and be hooked on it.

And I do also want to really credit my friend Brad Kolodner for starting that jam in Baltimore with his dad.

He's done a lot of that work as well in Baltimore.

And I'm definitely kind of always taking notes from him and trying to pick his brain about how he's getting more people involved.

And I have seen how the jam there has grown and tried to kind of replicate that here.

So one of the things that I do at the first Friday jams in particular is have a slow hour.

For the first hour of the jam from 6 to 7, we just play easy tunes slow.

So if you play guitar, but maybe you're not that fast at changing chords or you need to practice hearing the chord changes and following, or maybe you're a beginner fiddle player and your fingers or your bowing just doesn't quite go where you want it to, yet you can come to that slow hour and just practice.

The other thing is getting people to be comfortable with making mistakes.

So one of the huge benefits of a jam is that you are around all of these other people who you know, hopefully some of them know what they're doing and they're holding it down.

So it's not on you like it is if you're in a band performing.

It's not on you to play your part exactly right every single time.

You can sit back and listen or you can make a mistake and play a wrong note and the tunes loop so it's just going to come back around again.

And if you mess up the first time and try the next time, and if you're wrong the second time, try a different way the third time.

There's only two parts, right?

Like the A, the B.

Well, that's a dangerous thing to say.

Generally that is the case, yes, but not always.

I did come across a tune recently that had seven parts.

Holy crap.

But yeah, generally the tunes are gonna be 64 beats long, which is the length of like a set dance or a contra dance.

So that the dance steps fit the phrasing of the tune.

That's not necessarily true with square dancing, but we don't need to get into the weeds on that.

But yeah, the tunes have a structure to them so that it's really easy for somebody if they're paying attention to say, oh, it repeats there.

So I'm gonna try this thing there and then I'm gonna go back and try this other thing and then it's just gonna come back around again forever.

And we'll play the same T, like 10 minutes.

Yeah.

And I just wanted to say also, like, just like the community side of this is so welcoming, so open.

And like you said, it's okay to make mistakes and it has to be one of the safest communities I've been in for music.

So that's really nice.

As someone who didn't grow up playing anything, who's trying to like, get more confident with playing an instrument because, like, the concept of going to any jam sounds so intimidating.

But to go to a first Friday's event where you have a slow hour and it's like, oh, all you have to do is play 1, 4, 5 for this, like, tune and you'll be able to pick it up eventually.

That is just very safe.

And it encourages people to keep learning rather than feeling so intimidated and discouraged.

Yeah.

And I want to say also something that's really important to me about all of the jams is that they're intergenerational.

So I have learned so much from the older people that come out or that, you know, I went to their jams back in the day and now they're coming to mine.

And if there's something I don't know, it's so easy for me to just ask them.

Or, you know, a really beginner player might say, like, oh, I don't know, like, which finger I'm supposed to be putting down here.

Or maybe somebody shows up and they're playing like rock and roll guitar because they just don't like, they have.

They don't know what old time guitar sounds like.

And so an older person might say to them, like, hey, let me show you something.

Have you tried it this way?

So having that, that intergenerational community is very, very important to this also.

There's always somebody to show you a new way of doing something or a new way to approach something in a really kind and generous and compassionate way.

And because everybody has been there, like, you just have to remember that we all were at the back of the jam once too.

Like, I sucked once too, and all of the old people that come to my jams and come to hear me play.

Now, I was so embarrassed to play in front of them when I first started, but they never judged me.

They just said, keep coming back.

And the important thing was that I kept coming back.

I'm hesitant to say that anywhere is like a safe space, you know, because anything, anything can happen anywhere.

You can have a bad interaction with somebody.

But in general, I do think it's a place where people can be vulnerable and not feel like they're going to be judged or looked down on.

Because I think we all know people who play old time music all know that if we don't get more people involved in this and we don't get more young people, we don't pass it down, that it will go away.

Yeah.

And I think that's important for us to reinforce for all music.

I mean, if you don't go to shows, if you don't keep.

Keep contributing and giving back to your community, then your community is going to disappear.

And, you know, this is an important conversation to have all the time, so.

All right, well, we need to wrap things up, but we have one last question for you.

Who are you listening to right now?

Well, I know I did just mention Brad Klaudner who started the Baltimore Old Time Jams, and he just put out a couple singles on gourd banjo that I have been loving.

One came out today and one came out a couple of days ago called Old Growth.

So I think if you look that up, you know, it'll come up.

So Brad Kolodner, his New Gourd banjo stuff I've been listening to.

And I also just got a record in the mail from a band called the Horsenecks.

They're a duo out of the Pacific Northwest and they actually were here at Peyton Violin's a couple of months ago back in March.

They came through and they were doing a GoFundMe for their new record and.

Or a Kickstarter or something.

They were crowdfunding for their new record and I contributed to it right there at the show and it just came in the mail today and I put it on my record player as soon as I could and it's awesome.

It's so beautiful.

That's great.

Definitely gonna listen to that and listen to old time music because now I'm just intrigued.

How can people find you and how can people join a jam if they so wish?

Great questions.

People can find me on Instagram.

My handle is just my name with underscores after my first and last name.

And I also have a newsletter called Flower City Old Time that it lists.

I send it out every other week and it lists all of the old time and traditional music adjacent events.

So things like shows, jams, square dances, contra dances from pretty much all over western New York.

So I'm covering like Rochester, Buffalo, Ithaca kind of areas in that.

But that'll list all the jams.

Or you can just put First Fridays in your calendar at PeytonViolins from 6 to 9pm Amazing.

That sounds great.

Everyone go check that out.

Check out all the things we'll link out with the show episode in the show notes.

And Clara, thank you so much for educating us on old time music and showing the beautiful community we have here for old time music in Rochester.

And thanks for being on the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right, this has been another episode of Nights and Weekends.

Can I add really quick one more thing where people can find old time music?

If you want to be very, very entranced, you can go on YouTube and just type in clifftop in the search and have a merry little evening to yourself of the old time YouTube rabbit hole.

That sounds like a wonderful night.

Thank you.

That's all she wrote.

Sam.