Black Swamp Arts Festival Sunday music preview
By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Before she started playing bass for Lone Piñon 10 years ago, Tonya Nuñez was a fan of the traditional string band.
In a recent telephone interview, she recalled playing a set with a Bohemian pop disco band, and then very intently listening to Lone Piñon. “Something drew me to this music. I didn’t really recognize it, but it felt deeply familiar,” Nuñez said.
Her family roots run deep in New Mexico, back to the indigenous people on both sides. She was born in the state, but then with her father in the military, her family moved about. When she was a teenager, they settled back in New Mexico.
The music that Lone Piñon plays has similarly deep roots. “We are a string band,” she said, “and really to dig into the cultural roots of this region which is complicated. The history is really, really complicated. Some of the earliest European contacts were made here.”
She continued: “We’re music nerds and we’re drawn to the history of this area where music meets place and all the intersecting cultures that have come through over the hundreds of years … and also tracing how the music has evolved and the threads that have continued to hold some of it together.”
Lone Piñon, Nuñez bass, with multi-instrumentalists Jordan Wax, Karina Wilson, and Santiago Romero, will bring that vibrant string sound to the Black Swamp Festival for a 2 p.m. set on the Main Stage Sunday followed by a 4 p.m.set on the Community Stage. The festival gets underway today (Friday, 9/8) at 5 p.m. and runs through Sunday, Sept. 10 at 5 p.m. Click for details.
The music is “so danceable,” Nuñez said. “There’s so much energy in the highs and in the very soft ballads.” It’s a music that brings people together.
But it “barely survived,” she said. “It really dwindled significantly during the boom of rock ’n’ roll.”
Music lovers took to the new popular music. Fiddle couldn’t compete with the volume of electric guitars and drums. So, it almost disappeared from dance music. Accordion fared better because it could project and be heard in the new setting.
Still the fiddle tradition was persisted at fiddle festivals around the country. Even now, she said, they will be at a festival and a fiddler whose never been to New Mexico, will know a few of the traditional rhythms.
Some public schools, also had program to teach the traditional dances.
Maintaining this cultural treasure has required extensive field work. Only along the border in Texas and Mexico, New Mexico didn’t have much of a recording industry, and the music wasn’t written down.
Tunes that came up in the 1950s and 1960s remained in currency, and younger people knew them. But only a few elders recalled the songs from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Some people were still playing the old songs on porches and ditch banks,” she said.
While the members of Lone Piñon have written a few of their own tunes, almost all the tunes they play have been handed down through the generations.
“We take a traditional tune and really sculpt it,” Nuñez said. “Live it’s always a little bit different.”
That’s all part of the history. “Traditional music is a living breathing thing,” she said. They don’t know how the melody sounded when someone first hummed it or picked it out on an instrument.
“Everyone who’s touched it has contributed to it in some way.” Whether they learned the song from a person singing the 800th version or from a cassette table or vinyl album, they take what they hear and then put their own stamp on it.
“We become part of the history of the tune going forward.”
Listeners are still fascinated by the sound.
“The music itself is really, really dynamic and fun,” she said. “It moves in your mind. It moves in your heart and your feet. It just moves. It moves us and has that effect on audiences as well.”
Sunday’s line up
Lone Piñon’s set leads into festival closer Cole Chaney, an up-and-coming country singer songwriter for East Kentucky.
Main Stage 2023
- Alex Anest Organ Trio with BGSU grad Galen Bundy on organ, 11 a.m.
- Strictly Fine, 12:30 p.m.
- Lone Piñon, 2 p.m.
- Cole Chaney, 3:30 p.m.
Community Stage
- Toraigh, 11 a.m.
- it’s somewhat humanoid!, 12:15 p.m.
- Zack Fletcher + Strings, 1:30 p.m.
- Freight Street, 2:45 p.m.
- Lone Piñon, 4 p.m.
Family Stage
- Zack Fletcher + Strings, 11 a.m.
- AmpWagon (Best of Black Swamp Set), 12:30 p.m.
- Alex Anest Organ Trio, 2 p.m.
- Strictly Fine, 3:45 p.m.
