Old Fresno Trio

Old Time music is the sound of the American dance floor before radio and records: fiddle tunes carried over from Britain, Ireland, Africa, and the European countryside, reshaped in the American South and Midwest, and passed hand to hand with little written down. It is the taproot of both bluegrass and country music. What keeps it alive is not a region but a community: musicians who gather, trade tunes, and play them the way they were learned, by ear and in person.

In Fresno, that community has a lineage, and these three musicians are in the middle of it. For decades its center of gravity was Kenny Hall, the blind mandolinist and fiddler who lived here until his death in 2013 and who carried some 1,100 tunes in his head, learned from fellow students at the California School for the Blind, coworkers at the broom factories where he worked, 78 rpm records, and radio broadcasts. Hall introduced generations of West Coast musicians to Old Time music and effectively invented the modern Old Time mandolin sound. The Fresno Folklore Society has long been the hub where this music gets played.

Terry Barrett took up fiddle, mandolin, and guitar young and played alongside Kenny Hall for many years, traveling with him and absorbing his repertoire and his distinctive approach directly at the source. He is now among the foremost interpreters of Hall’s mandolin style and teaches these tunes at Old Time gatherings up and down the state.

Barry Schultz, a Fresno native, learned harmonica from his grandmother and grew up with his father’s collection of old 78s. He came to the fiddle in his late twenties and has spent a lifetime on it since — traveling through the South, including Appalachia, to learn directly from elder fiddlers, among them Clyde Davenport, Armand Barnett, and Charley Acuff, brother of Roy. He spent years in the Pacific Northwest music scene, played for square dances throughout the region, and worked in a violin shop, eventually building his own instruments.

Megan Bohigian’s art form is back-up guitar, laying down the road for these two remarkable fiddlers to ride on. She was also Fresno’s 5th Poet Laureate.