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real authentic sound of old-time down-home country music may only be found in museums and on records.
dance, where the two-step and waltz kept pace to the beats.
Sylvester Moran, soon-to-turn 83, calls Kiln his home. “I was partly raised there,” he quietly lets you know. Later home became Fenton, a community only a hop, skip and a jump away.
When he takes his fiddle out of its worn case these days, son Jack often accompanies his father on guitar. One of six children of Sylvester Moran and his late wife, he is the only one of the brood who took up fiddling. "I watched him and guess just picked it up," he says of his father. ‘‘He plays old tunes that have never been recorded.”
In a trace of the backwoods of America, the Smithsonian Institution learned of old fiddlers like Moran and in 1974 invited them to Washington, where their works are now recorded history.
They found, one source said this week, that Mississippi holds the distinction of having the greatest variety of styles of fiddling than anywhere in the United States.
Many of the traditional musical, and social, values represented and relfected in country music, the national museum found, had been challenged, and, like so many other parts of our heritage and our past, it, too, had begun to feel the homogenizing pressures of mass culture and mass markets.
not enough,” he paused to chuckle, “to hurt my fiddling.”
Sylvester McCloud “picked it up” when he was about 12. "I learned listening to my father,” he recalls. “Later I took some lessons at St. Stanislaus. That’s when I learned to play by note.”
He plans to be on the mall today “and give a demonstration’’ right alongside competing fiddlers. “I won’t complete,” he says honorably, “although the prizes are good. Believe it’s $100 for the first prize, $50 for second. Not too bad for about 15 minutes of fun.”
Although in the past few years, country music has achieved new heights of creative expression and reached out to vast new nationwide and worldwide audiences, the elder Moran said he was rather surprised to see some young fiddlers at the 1974 American Folklife Festival. “I was impressed that an eight-year-old got up and played one of the old tunes as good as anybody,” he remarked, still somewhat surprised.
Some youngsters are expected to participate in the Mississippi Folklife Festival fiddling contest today at the mall. The festival, sponsored by the Gulfport Junior Auxiliary and the Gulf Coast Arts Council, opened Thursday and concludes on the mall at 4 p.m. Today's mall activities begin at