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August 25, 2009

Old-Time Music Festival

'Wild Boogers' know their history

Band takes the stage at Saturday’s Old-Time Music Festival in Goldbug.

By Samantha Swindler/Managing Editor

One does not expect a conversation about the organic art-form of old-time music with members of a band who call themselves The Wild Boogers.

But the Boogers, who performed at Saturday’s Old-Time Music Festival in Goldbug — know their music roots.

All three members — John Rodgers with vocals, guitar, banjo and, yes, kazoo; Daniel Frederick with banjo, fiddle and vocals; and Nathan ‘Bird’ Kiser with fiddle, banjo and vocals — are students at Morehead State University and participants in the Kentucky Center for Traditional Music.

Though each has long had an interest in old-time music, the Boogers only began playing together this year.

“I guess we got the interest really from family, and we all started off playing different styles,” Kiser said. “John played in a blues band, I was in a bluegrass band for a while and Daniel played rock and roll. So we started college, heard about the program, KCTM, and we all kind of met up there and we started having jam sessions together once a week and decided to put a band together.”

The Kentucky Center for Traditional Music was created in June 2000 at MSU, and works to preserve traditional music through collections of artifacts, sponsorships of performances and training and nurturing of musicians and instrument makers, known as luthiers. KCTM’s definition of traditional music “embraces bluegrass, historical folk, old timey, mountain, gospel, blues, and other music forms spanning the full range of acoustic instrumentation and vocal presentation.”

But The Wild Boogers prefer the loose, organic and variety of styles old-time encompasses — banjo tunes, fiddle tunes, storytelling and ballads. Specifically, they work to differentiate old-time with its more popular successor, bluegrass.

“It’s a lot more appealing, I think, just because it’s more eclectic,” Rodgers said of old-time. “...It’s a lot less commercialized. I mean, you can come to a place like this and perform, but it’s really just more music (for) sitting on your porch playing and having a good time with people you know.”

Old-time is meant to be improvised and played by a group, and often, all instruments perform the melody at once.

“There’s a lot more beauty in the music than bluegrass,” Frederick added. “Bluegrass is all dry and this is more of an organic art form.

“This is our heritage, bluegrass is not, that was a commercialized form of music,” he said. “We all grew up in places where old-time fiddlers lived and their children still live and there’s a legacy that actually exists. Bluegrass was just based around making money.”

The Wild Boogers were one of several regional old-time artists who performed at the Whitley County Extension Agency in Goldbug Saturday. Others were Donna and Lewis Lamb of Paint Lick, the father-daughter duo who were recipients of the 2007 Kentucky Governor’s Folklife Award. Russ Childers of the Rabbit Hash String Band, Lexington fiddler Nikos Pappas, and Sarah Woods of Flatwoods also took to the stage.

A third and final Old-Time Music Festival is scheduled for Sept. 5 at the extension service building on U.S. 25, off I-75 Exit 15. Music starts at 10 a.m. and continues until 5 p.m. for a supper break. Musicians will return from 7-9 p.m. for a square dance.

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