"How do you tell one fiddle tune from another?" an old friend asked me one day. When I replied that I didn't know, he explained, "The titles." Not entirely fair, of course, but I laughed even without the permission of knowing it's a fiddler's joke (I hope it is). At least for us non-fiddlers and even more so for us non-musicians, it's true enough. My friend, I should add, is a guitarist of world reputation. He remains anonymous here to allow him to continue to work among his fellow folk musicians.

Hog-Eyed Man, on the other hand, is an oldtime fiddle band with skeletal backing from a modest collection of other stringed instruments, sometimes contributed (as on the present disc) by guest artists. Its albums, of which Kicked Up a Devil of a Row is the fifth, practically never feature songs with words. If the entirety of your exposure to an album of traditional fiddle instrumentals were to this one, you wouldn't get the joke.

The group, which consists at its core of two Georgians, Jason Cade and Rob McMaken, lives inside a pre-recording industry ideal of Appalachian sound, incorporating what was family (and long-since historical) memory of Irish and Scottish models into what became a native music, intended for dancing, entertaining and contemplating. One has to hear Hog-Eyed Man to appreciate how removed what it is doing stands from current American fiddling, in good part associated with country and bluegrass. Don't get me wrong: having heard those genres all of my life, I am perfectly fond of that kind of playing. It's just that this is truly something else, with an ambience of such beauty -- dark, bright and other shades -- that it ought to feel like the distant landscape of another reality but is instead warm and close, even if still offering up a glance of the otherworldly.

The material comes in part from tunes Cade learned growing up in rural North Carolina, one reason he and McMaken don't base their education on 78s from the 1920s, when what would eventually be called country music began with the fiddle powerfully represented, to influence nearly all who heard thereafter. Before then recordings, field or studio, did not exist. Among traditional musicians, the tunes were literally carried through the air, which is how Hog-Eyed Man gives the impression of transporting them. Once they got to the Southern mountains from across that Western ocean (if I may quote the shanty of that name), the melodies, tunings and instruments settled in to take up residence and be subject only to the passing outside influence. That didn't make them any less rich and complex. It was just a different kind of richness and complexity.

Kicked Up a Row consists of 57 minutes and 22 cuts. Every number is memorable and distinct. Even the occasional familiar cut (e.g., "Devil's Dream," "Wagoner," "Cacklin' Hen") doesn't sound the way you remember it, and the (mostly) new-to-me stuff (e.g., "Polly Grand," "Nancy Dawson," "New Five Cents") staggers the heart. Take my word for it: it's not just the names.

If anybody is doing superior recordings of oldtime music these days, I'm not hearing them.

[ visit the Hog-Eyed Man website ]