School becomes old folk home

Sarah Goeke has played the violin. But nowadays she plays a fiddle and is working on her knowledge of bluegrass and folk songs.

"I know Charlie Daniels' 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia,'" said Goeke, a member of the fiddle team at Cape Girardeau's Central High School. "But who doesn't know that? I don't even know half these songs."

Since September, the members of the fiddle team, an extracurricular club apart from the school's regular musical groups, have been coming together to learn and play songs from America's musical roots -- folk and bluegrass -- and loving it.

Central orchestra director and team sponsor Steve Schafner created the fiddle team as a temporary group to learn two Civil War-era songs for a Veterans Day assembly.

But the group wouldn't settle for being temporary, and the teens kept showing up to play songs from days past, expanding their musical horizons through history.

"We're taking different American styles and giving them a taste of everything," Schafner said.

Every Wednesday the 12 to 15 students come in to the band room at the high school at 6:45 a.m., many bleary-eyed from waking up an hour earlier than normal. They bring guitars, banjos, accordions and fiddles.

The atmosphere and approach of the fiddle team is casual.

"We try not to get stressed," Schafner said with a chuckle. "We're not like violinists -- they're anxiety-ridden all the time."

The students are just there to enjoy themselves.

"I just like it, it's something different," said junior guitarist J.D. Mungle. Mungle is the group's leader, if one can say the group has a leader. He plays gospel music in a praise and worship band.

When the students straggle in, Mungle leads them through songs they are practicing, playing the tunes on CDs while he strums offbeat rhythms on his guitar so the others can listen and play along to songs like the folk tune "Billy in the Low Ground," which has origins in the early 19th century and remains a bluegrass standard.

The group takes its own initiative, sometimes beginning practices before Schafner enters the room.

"One of the neat things about it is that it's self-guided," he said. "I stay on the edges. It's not like a normal rehearsal."

Schafner does join the group, though, picking up his standup bass and playing a walking beat, intermittently plucking stings and slapping the bass to the melody of the fiddle and the plucking of the banjo, played by another faculty member, Brandon Jones. It all comes together as a homage to Southeast Missouri's country roots, which is why the group is called the fiddle team, not the violin team.

"We live in an area where people, when they see a violin, more often than not they call it a fiddle," Schafner said.

New folk roots

Central student Goeke is newly acquainted with those roots, having been taught to play in the classical tradition. Her father is Dr. Christopher Goeke, who teaches singing at Southeast Missouri State University.

Since joining the fiddle team in September, she's come to enjoy the sounds of traditional American styles.

"It's been great," she said. "It's a lot more relaxed. I can add some embellishment that I can't in classical music."

Sarah's father sees the fiddle team as a great way to enhance the talents of the young musicians and get them familiar with American musical culture.

"That kind of music gets overlooked, and it's really the heart of American music," Dr. Goeke said.

To the other students at the high school, Mungle said, the fiddle team is a strange entry in an arena where popular culture rules, if they even know about the folk group.

"For some people at school it's a culture shock," he said. "Some think it's cool, some think it's old, some don't like it -- they probably have musical blinders on."

Principal Dr. Mike Cowan has seen and heard the fiddle team. He said he was enchanted by the team's performance at a discussion of "The River Between Us" featuring author Richard Peck at the school library.

"They're exceptionally fine musicians," Cowan said. "They seem to really have a passion and a personal satisfaction in performing."

Cowan said having the group highlights the school's diversity in learning and culture and the many talents Central students have.

The twangy, down-home sound of the strings stands in sharp contrast to the rap and rock music popular with most young people, but that farm-cultivated sound is right at home in Southeast Missouri, even if it's not old-timers playing.

Accordion player Jacob Henry doesn't care how weird it looks for a high school senior to be playing such an instrument.

"I like the accordion," he said. "I think it's sexy," he added, joking.

msanders@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182