Avoiding the dreaded day job: young musician juggles private students, performances
By John Gever
For the Dominion Post
It's a truism that performing artists can't make a living at it, especially when they're young. Enough so that the classic taunt hurled at a less-than-stellar performer is, "Don't quit your day job!"
For Rachel Eddy, who plays and teaches traditional Appalachian and Celtic music, there is no day job except with fingers on strings.
Here is how one young woman makes a full-time living as a musician, with no Juilliard degree, no faculty appointment, no recording contract.
It helps to have the right parents. Richard and Linda Eddy were popular traditional music players in their own right, and had their daughter on stage when she was barely beyond toddlerhood. "(Richard) was a stage dad," Rachel said in a recent interview. "He made me get up in front of people."
She took up the fiddle (her father's instrument) at age 9, and later the guitar, mandolin and tenor and "clawhammer" banjo -- all the core tools (minus the bass) of mountain music. For a long time, she said, she was introduced as Richard Eddy's daughter, but lately her renown is such that he is now often identified as Rachel's dad.
Eddy performs regularly. She appears at traditional music festivals, and has performed with pickup groups of friends at various local venues. Next weekend, she'll play with her father and Tim Terman as the "Morgantown River Rats" at the Gardner Winter Music Festival at Morgantown's South Middle School.
More recently, she has formed a band called the Mo'town Rounders that she hopes will have more permanence. The Rounders were scheduled to appear last Friday at the Met Theatre in downtown Morgantown, and have another gig scheduled March 5 at the Rosewood Theatre, also in Morgantown. (The band also includes Scott Phillips, Jason Jaros and Eddy's husband Walt Sarkees. The same group is scheduled to perform at the Gardner festival under the name Three Dollar Swamp Tour.)
However, Eddy concedes there's not a lot of money in performing, at least not when it's only once a week or so. Her main income stream comes from private students.
Eddy said she now has about 40 individual students, mainly young people but some adults. She sees 10 per day, mostly in half-hour sessions, either at her Westover home or at Fawley Music Company in Sabraton.
She said she'd had as many as 52 at one time but that was an uncomfortable load.
In addition, Eddy teaches in camps and workshops. At the Gardner festival, she'll be giving a beginning fiddle lesson. For the past two years, she's served as an instructor at the Augusta Heritage Center on the Davis & Elkins College campus in Elkins, first as a staff instructor during Old-Time Week and then last year as a guitar teacher.
Eddy is especially proud of the association with Augusta, perhaps the nation's leading traditional music and arts camp. She is scheduled to participate again this year, as a banjo instructor during Old-Time Week in October.
Key to a successful private teaching career, at least for her, is an inexhaustible love of the music, and an uncanny way with children.
Both were evident recently at Percival Hall on the WVU Evansdale campus, where she meets every other Tuesday evening for informal -- and unpaid -- sessions with some of her young students.
Seven boys, most between 8 and 10 years old, pulled fiddles, mandolins and guitars out of their cases and sat in a circle in the building's lobby. They tuned their instruments and goofed around until Eddy strode in and uncased her own fiddle. The goofing stopped and the group began a slow-paced number, the four fiddles necessarily dominating.
Eddy never raised her voice, talking to the kids with the same jovial tone and inflection she'd used with a newspaper reporter a few days earlier. Yet she commanded rapt attention from her bandsmen whenever she spoke, telling what to listen for from fellow players and offering other pointers on group playing.
Most of the kids are private paying students, she said, but what the kids learn at the Percival Hall sessions "is not something you can teach in a lesson." And it's important to her that children learn the essence of traditional music, "part of (which) is being able to jam," that is, improvise with other musicians.
For the same reason, she doesn't require her students to read music. "I do teach by ear," she said, as another part of traditional mountain music, "and I pass it on that way."
"She's great with kids," said Bettina Davis, whose son Tristan is an Eddy student learning guitar and mandolin.
Another parent, Randy Minor, has two children studying with Eddy and a third starting to ask about it. "I think for most kids studying music is a chore," he said. "With Rachel it's fun. She makes them want to practice and get better."
Whatever her secret is, it's working in business terms. Walt Sarkees, who married Eddy last fall, has done computer consulting and web design, but gave it up to be a band manager. "Rachel is the primary income," he said. (Eddy said about Sarkees, "he's the brain.")
But as good as she is at teaching, it's not her chief ambition. She said she hopes Mo'town Rounders "takes us somewhere." She'd like to have the opportunity to tour and live the performing life.
"I don't ever mind working seven days a week," she said, "because I love what I do."
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