Studying Old-Time Fiddle: Dwight Diller's Approach to Teaching, and Learning

Dwight Diller was born in Charleston, West Virginia, in August 1946 and spent most of his life in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. He passed away on 14 February 2023. Dwight devoted his life to preserving, performing, and teaching the tunes of The Old People from the high mountain forests of east central West Virginia. In the late 1990s, I was guided to Dwight's old-time banjo playing and encouraged - by my first teacher, Bates Littlehales - to look to Dwight for guidance on playing...
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Dwight Diller was born in Charleston, West Virginia, in August 1946 and spent most of his life in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. He passed away on 14 February 2023. Dwight devoted his life to preserving, performing, and teaching the tunes of The Old People from the high mountain forests of east central West Virginia. In the late 1990s, I was guided to Dwight's old-time banjo playing and encouraged - by my first teacher, Bates Littlehales - to look to Dwight for guidance on playing old-time banjo, clawhammer style. In 2019, motivated by the realization that rotator cuff repair surgery had left me significantly less able to wield a five-string banjo, I found the confidence necessary to attempt to learn the rudiments of fiddling, to push through challenges at a pace that suited me. I was, or at least I thought I was, willing to try to get around the obstacles that age imposed in the form of less nimble hands, fingers, and shoulders. This "confidence" gave me reason to shove aside my lack of "Music Theory" and music reading knowledge, and to embark on muddling through the process of learning something new at this stage in life. However, none of that would have happened without the encouragement and assistance that Dwight Diller offered me. This book, in honor of Dwight as a friend and a teacher, developed from my notes, our email correspondence, and phone discussions, and the recorded music he sent me over three years - from 2019 to 2023 - during which Dwight helped me learn some fiddling. I would not have attempted this writing project had I not put in the work on the "first volume," Dwight Diller: West Virginia Mountain Musician (McFarland, 2016). That work convinced me that there was more than met the eye, or the ear, about Dwight's teaching work.