John Morris: My brother got drafted in the Army in ’68 during the Vietnam War, and we had him a big going away party. All kinds of old-time music people showed up, the old people showed up. When he came back, we had him a welcome home party. We decided we’d try to have a regular thing, and the thing was we wanted to have old people come play music and the young people come join in with them. We didn’t have no contest; we didn’t pit nobody against each other. It was people coming and playing music, and they enjoyed the music. They enjoyed each other.
JM: To me that music is history. It’s just as important as a history book. If you could go back far enough to the day that those tunes were written, they were written for a purpose, for an event, for a celebration of a happening. Somebody went through a life struggle or somebody had a happiness in their life, and the result was a fiddle tune.
JM: You can’t play a fiddle tune without remembering the person you learned it from. It’s like you go to play a tune and you remember the person you learned it from. You mention him to somebody, maybe tell a story about him. It’s like you’re visiting them all over again. You keep him alive within you, and it lives within you. You’re never alone. It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing that I associated with these people, and I try to pass on that sort of life that they lived and the goodness that they had in them. I try to pass that on, and I try to be somebody that people will remember.
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