At our welcoming mountain retreat in Blowing Rock, NC, The Walker Family Band provides a family camp experience that honors more traditional methods of teaching – mentoring by example, learning tunes by watching and listening, forming groups of all ages and abilities – to help develop everyone’s individual skill level, thus, increasing enjoyment of music making for each individual and the enjoyment of sharing our talents with others. Our camp is designed to be inclusive of all family members; musicians as well as non-musicians. We schedule classes and camp wide activities that facilitate mental relaxation, spiritual rejuvenation, and social interaction and enjoyment that is inclusive of all our participants no matter their age or musical experience.

Most of us in America have not learned music in a truly traditional way. We did not grow up hearing our grandfather playing his fiddle by the hearth, our mother singing us to sleep with old lullabies. We listen and learn from recordings, radio or TV, electronic devices. We too rarely have that face-to-face transmission from one heart, one soul, to another; that intimate, powerful contact that is at the very heart of the human experience. We in the WFB like to think that we are cultivating something of that experience, and surely, we feel the wonderful reward of sharing music directly with youngsters and their families.

Traditionalists will say Irish music is not meant to be taught in groups, in a classroom setting. It is not to be learned from musical arrangements in books. And surely to write these tunes down, these mysterious elusive tunes, is to fossilize them in a way, to pretend there is only one way to play them. But most of us do not live in a society where there is an unbroken living tradition to draw from. Folklorists would call us Revivalists: we receive the material second hand, removed from its original context, and create a shadow of what was there before.

While it may seem to some that the way most of us play Irish or Old-time “Traditional” music is anything but traditional or authentic, we are most certainly engaged in the process of building new traditions upon the old ones, honoring them when we can, replacing them if they can’t work for us. A common misconception about folklorists is that they strive to preserve the old, and surely that is an aspect of their work. But much more important is to celebrate and foster the process, and that is really the goal of The Walker Family Band.

Scott says that by teaching these tunes he is cultivating a garden. As much fun as it is to choose, learn and play these tunes, the true joy comes from spending time in the garden, creating a community of gardeners, to engage the power of the experience of human creation in a society which has developed a sad habit of just watching, or just purchasing. Music is the tool we use, but not the true product of our work. Our ideal is to put music in the hands of our students as an avenue to share their spirit with each other, and with their listeners, and their students, and theirs, to create for all, the joyful process of making and sharing the essence of the human experience.