BUENA VISTA — Katie Harford Hogue has a complicated relationship with her dad.
He’s the late John Hartford, celebrated fiddle player, bluegrass aficionado, all-time American songwriter with one of the most widely recorded country songs of all time, “Gentle on My Mind.”
“Goethe may have been the last person to know everything worth knowing, but John Hartford tried,” one radio host wrote in 2016.
Hogue says her father was a renaissance man, a prolific creator and a jack-of-all-trades. Or, almost all.
“Nobody can do everything,” she submitted, after rattling off all the things that John could do. “Nobody can have it all. To do everything he did he had to make some sacrifices, and family was one of them.”
After Hartford died in 2001, Hogue recovered 68 journals full of unrecorded songs that he’d written while he was learning how to notate music later in his life. The pages were filled with riffs, covers and plenty of originals. Hogue scrolled through a spreadsheet where she’d compiled all the titles and estimated that they’d recovered about 3,000-4,000 tunes, “to make a conservative guess,” she said.
That is also how Hogue started to connect with her father, seven years after he passed away.
The journals became the basis for the John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, an amorphous initiative that includes a tour, two compilation records and a book called “John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes.”
The fiddle project’s latest endeavor is a partnership with Camp Coletrain, the weeklong music camp run by Coleman Smith out of Buena Vista.
The partnership, announced Thursday during the ninth annual Camp Coletrain, will blend the camp’s multigenre and multigenerational ethos with Hartford’s far-reaching influence. Beginning next year, the camp will teach songs from Hartford’s mammoth fiddle book, and close out with four competitions — fiddle, mandolin, flat picking and troubadour — to honor his legacy.
The hydra-like fiddle project is fitting for Hartford’s legacy, who was hard to pin in the bluegrass world. He was as traditional as he was anarchic, and he regularly reached outside of the scene to pull in new sounds, artists and audiences (the most recent example of which was in 1999, two years before his death, when he leant his fiddle, vocals and expertise to the “O Brother, Where Art Thou” soundtrack).
The fiddle project is one way to carry on his far-reaching legacy, Hogue said. It’s also been a great way for her to get to know her dad.
“What he poured into other people with the music, that maybe I didn’t get as a kid, I’m getting back now as an adult,” she said. “When people tell me how gracious, and kind, and helpful he was, how he never made them feel intimidated, it’s like I’m getting him back. It just kind of took the long way around.”
Keep it moving
Coleman Smith never met John Hartford in person, but in some ways he’s a kindred spirit. For one, Smith is always on the move.
As the fiddle player for the Yonder Mountain String Band and founder of both Camp Coletrain and the Coletrain Music Academy (his year-round music education program), Smith blends a picturesque rural life in Buena Vista with the jetsetting of a touring musician. “Two to four planes per week,” he said. Usually Southwest, since they treat the instruments well.
Even when he isn’t shuttling over state lines, he’s walking, talking, teaching, leading, playing, listening. The young girls at Camp Coletrain have a game to see who can get him to talk the longest. “We got Coleman to talk for five minutes,” one declared triumphantly on Thursday, the last day of camp. Her prompt to him: Why did you choose fiddle?
Smith grew up in rural north Texas about an hour northwest of Dallas, in a house often filled with classical (his mother was a choreographer) and jazz, as well as standard north Texas sounds: country, folk and rock. At 3 years old he saw a fiddle contest at the mall and lost his little mind.
“Santa Claus brought me my first violin,” Smith said. “It was a 1/16th-scale model that wound up being too big. So we found a place with a 1/32-scale violin. It looked like a Christmas tree ornament, but it was a fully functioning violin.”
Before long his parents were driving him three hours roundtrip, three times per week, to hone his violin and fiddle skills. That experience stayed with him as he formed the music academy decades later, offering online instruction for small-town music students who aren’t guaranteed access to fiddle, bass or mandolin.
The other formative experience that Smith tries to replicate with the camps is the intergenerational exchange of knowledge.
“I just thought everyone hung out with old dudes who were wildly good at music,” Smith said, of his childhood bouncing around the Texas western swing scene. “They were all senior citizens when I was just a little kid. But since I had a love and passion to play, they welcomed me.”
The camp is full of kids, parents, high profile acts and nascent family bands, hailing from Paris, Texas, and Moab, Utah, and other remote outposts all over the West.
Get on your own way
Casey Kinder, a 16-year-old musician from Buena Vista, has been studying with the Coletrain Music Academy since she was 10. Early on she started following Smith’s lead, helping out at local festivals and gigs.
“I was still really, really young, so it had a really big impact on me,” Kinder said. “I really wanted to be able to meet a stranger, know a basic 3-chord song, and be able to solo back and forth with this person.”
She’s still working on her soloing — that was one of her big breakthroughs at camp this year. “It’s always kind of intimidated me, I never really knew anything other than you’re stringing together melodies on the top of your head,” she said. But after working in a small group with 18-year-old Mia Fiddes, “that’s when it clicked,” Kinder said. “All these things that people have been teaching me over the last six years that I’ve been playing, it all just started to come together. It was a big lightbulb moment.”
Fiddes and her sisters, who play in a family band called “Morningside,” traveled up from Texas for Camp Coletrain last year and returned again this summer, reconnecting with people who they’ve met in the bluegrass scene. All week long, the streets, parks and venues are dotted with folks swapping fiddle knowledge or what they learned about the electric bass that day.
The songbook is cool, and the contest will be great, but the spontaneous exchange of knowledge might be the most important part of the new partnership with the John Hartford Foundation. As much as Hartford was a constant learner he was also a generous teacher, handing over everything he knew, every chance he got.
“I would hope a young person who approaches his music is inspired by it, and then goes ahead and uses it to get on their own way,” Hogue said. “A person is on this Earth for however long, 80 years maybe. The whole point of legacy is not to continue lifting up that person, it’s to use those gifts left for all the people who are still here, to use as they see fit.”