Sheila Kay Adams and Rayna Gellert

Sample of "Way of the World," performed by Rayna Gellert

Cecil Sharpe, the English musicologist who collected and recorded the music of Appalachia in the 1920s, predicted that the unvarnished old-time style would be a thing of the past a generation later. But this weekend's Berkeley Old-Time Music Convention in Berkeley CA proved again that he was wrong.

While the style has given birth to a variety of derivative styles—from string bands to bluegrass to folk music to mainstream country—the original old-timey sound remains a vibrant form with plenty of practitioners and even innovators keeping the tradition alive.

The convention demonstrated that in a series of performances and dances at The Freight & Salvage and other Berkeley venues featuring artists such as Sheila Kay Adams, The Brandy Snifters, The Stairwell Sisters, Rayna Gellert and Foghorn Stringband. But a panel discussion with Adams, Gellert and Lyle Lofgren provided the best context for why old-time music remains relevant today. The discussion, held at a University of California concert hall, was moderated by UC-Berkeley music professor Ben Brinner and was attended by more than 100 students in his Music and American Culture class as well as by BOTMC participants.

It was Lofgren who took note of Sharpe's faulty prediction during the discussion, but it was the youthful Gellert—best known as the fiddler in the popular all-female string band Uncle Earl—who embodied the apparent contradiction. Each of the panelists took a different path to the music, and that variation seemed to demonstrate the process of handed-down tradition that has kept the music alive.

Adams is the real deal—a seventh-generation singer, clawhammer banjo player and story teller from Madison County in western North Carolina who carries the tradition in her genes and her blood. She started singing at age five, learning the old ballads from her great aunt Dellie Chandler Norton and other relatives.

"We had four singing and picking families and everyone was related by marriage or blood or both. A lot of us were double first cousins and that's all I'll say about that," she said. Today, she is something of an old-time ambassador, having written several books of stories and fiction that bring the culture to life, in addition to performing and recording the music. She was a consultant on the wonderful film "Songcatcher," a fictionalization of the discovery of mountain music by early ethnomusicologists like Sharpe.

But Lofgren and Gellert came to the music second-hand. Lofgren, a Minnesotan of Swedish descent, says he discovered it as a college student after hearing Pete Seeger in 1957. Gellert said she learned old-time from her father, who also was first exposed to it during the late-50s, early-60s "folk scare." Both of them grew up in northern states and learned to "channel a southeastern sound," as Lofgren described it.

Each of them learned in the folk process—absorbing songs and techniques from other players. "It is not something that can be faithfully transcribed to paper," said Gellert, who said she had to unlearn some of her classical violin training to become accomplished playing old-time. "We use a lot of non-standard tunings and a less linear bowing style," she said.

Similarly, the vocal techniques demonstrated by Adams use "ornamentations" and "crooked" phrasing that cannot be reproduced in sheet music. Her singing has a droning quality that seems to mimic the double-stop resonances typical in old-time instrumentation.

The songs themselves are far from fixed, either, as was demonstrated by the multiple versions of the ballad "Young Hunting" sung by Lofgren and Adams. It was first written down by the English collector Francis James Childs in 1756, but Lofgren sang a Texas version called "Love Henry" and Adams followed with a version called "Henry Lee."

While the music has kept alive though this kind of handed-down process, it has also spun off various more commercial musical styles, such as bluegrass. Lofgren said that these derivative styles put more emphasis on guitar, mandolin and bass, while old-time relies mainly on fiddle and banjo. To him, the more precise instrumentation of bluegrass imposes too much structure that he jokingly called "fascistic."

Adams told a story about the influential bluegrass banjo stylist Earl Scruggs developing his five-fingered picking technique from a simpler version of the rolling licks played by one of her relatives, Obray Ramsey.

"When I emceed a show with Earl once, I mentioned that I thought he stole his licks from Obray, and he said it was true," she said. Since then, of course, just about every bluegrass banjo picker plays in the Scruggs style, so that's one more case of the music being handed down and kept alive.

If Cecil Sharpe could have attended this year's convention, he would have been surprised to see musicians young and old still playing and singing in the old-time style in 2008.