This may sound negative to people in a certain mindset, but I find it somehow comforting that in Old Time music jam sessions, people are basically interchangeable. One person playing the fiddle might suddenly start playing guitar or banjo or vice versa. And since you’re playing traditional songs which have a fairly basic repetitive pattern, somebody of just about any skill level can play a lot of the material - depending on what instrument you’re playing. And it somehow doesn’t really sound bad when you screw up, or when you have a bunch of people hitting weird extra notes, or not coming in on time or people singing out of key or out of harmony. It just sounds somehow good because you’re a bunch of people come together under a particular spirit with a basic template cut out for you already of how to interact with one another. It’s very much a ritual in a certain sense, but unlike any I ever experienced under my parents’ religious upbringing, it is a joyous one. True in the sense of what religious community experiences are supposed to be, I gather: an act of celebration, which bursts out into song because that’s just what happens when people get together: excitement, drama, beauty. And the players come and go and the faces change, and some know the parts better than others and some have a certain flair that nobody else could ever match or replace. But the songs go on without us, somehow interpenetrate and go through us, those spirits, memories, hearts and souls which attached themselves to it. There’s a wonderful line in a Woody Guthrie song on Dust Bowl Ballads, where the preacher talks about how we might all just be one big soul. I guess that’s why there’s that song about if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. I’m never sure if I really agree with that song or not. It doesn’t scare me or concern me anymore that we might all be basically the same. It once did, the notion that I wasn’t unique, that I was just another unit in a particular line of models. Oddly enough, giving up that whole way of living - that way of threatened-by-everything worrying-about-nothing - has given me everything it was I wanted back before I knew even how to put it into words.