Episode 500: Frank Fairfield (The Theoretical, The Practical, and the Poetical)

March 25, 2026·1 hr 35 min·7 clips

Frank Fairfield describes his touring years as 'my job was just to hate myself in a different town every day.'

1. Get Up in the Cool, a show about old-time music hosted by Cameron DeWitt, reaches its 500th episode with a conversation and jam with musician Frank Fairfield. 2. Cameron DeWitt is the host and a claw hammer banjo player; Frank Fairfield is a multi-instrumentalist and music teacher based in Los Angeles, previously known as a touring folk performer. 3. The episode functions as a milestone reflection on how both men's relationships with music have changed over the twelve years since DeWitt first saw Fairfield perform in Fishtown, Philadelphia. 4. The conversation begins with the two playing a tune attributed to Eck Robertson — described as a 'kind of western-ish thing' — which leads into a discussion of Robertson's Grigsby's Hornpipe, the recording that gave the show its name. 5. Fairfield critiques what he calls the 'reveling in your own ignorance' strand of old-time music culture — the idea that authenticity is proven by backwardness — and calls it a projection of anti-intellectualism onto musicians who were proud and skilled professionals. 6. He compares this romanticism to a 'make America great again attitude,' an idealization of a purer past that doesn't accurately represent how fluid and varied old-time music actually was in the era of commercial recordings. 7. The conversation moves into music theory, with Fairfield explaining tetrachords, the Pythagorean rationale for consonance, and the Greek concept of 'infixes' — notes that are movable between fixed consonants — as the structural basis for much old-time and folk melody. 8. Fairfield uses the pentatonic and the diatonic scale as examples of how the same underlying interval logic appears across cultures, arguing there is no meaningful distinction between 'folk music' and 'art music' at the level of structure. 9. He develops a music-as-food analogy: archaic music was purely functional, like eating grubs — blowing a conch shell to summon rain, imitating animal calls to hunt — before culture refined it into art, and then industry refined it into factory product. 10. He names contemporary manufactured popular music 'Cool Doritos Ranch Blast,' a product designed to extract money rather than serve listeners, and contrasts it with music that still exists 'outside the factory.' 11. The early music movement is discussed as arising partly from Western art music hitting a dead end with Schoenberg, driving musicians back toward older instruments, older fingerings, and older rhetorical frameworks for melody. 12. DeWitt raises Das Kapital, which he has been reading, and questions whether his own music-making is commodity production, asking Fairfield about the exchange value versus use value of playing old-time music. 13. This leads Fairfield to discuss an open letter he wrote years ago announcing he would stop performing — a document he describes as impossible to find online now, which he considers fortunate. 14. Fairfield describes his performing years as a cycle in which he was outwardly confident in a role he inwardly no longer believed, eventually framing every touring date as 'my job was just to hate myself in a different town every day' — Birmingham, Atlanta, overseas — until stopping felt like relief. 15. He then worked construction, describing the beauty of labor where 'someone passes you the thing and you know what he needs now' — a crew moving in wordless coordination — before admitting he 'got soft again' and returned to music through teaching. 16. Fairfield now teaches violin, guitar, banjo, and mandolin at the Neighborhood Music School in Boyle Heights, east Los Angeles, a school he describes as 111 years old and housed in a Victorian building. 17. He frames his teaching not as instruction in correct technique but as demonstrating to students the broader skill of how to learn physically — using the metaphor of the frontal lobe showing things to the 'lizard brain,' which is blind but retains whatever it receives. 18. DeWitt responds by describing how he used this same framework during a MIGRA Watch training for the Portland immigration rights coalition, memorizing scripts as muscle memory so he could be fully present and adaptive under pressure. 19. The episode's tone is discursive and intellectually wide-ranging, with long digressions into Greek music theory, Marxist political economy, and philosophy of education; both speakers are comfortable following a thread to its end regardless of tangents. 20. Listeners who enjoy long-form conversations about music philosophy, folk music history, and the intersection of craft and political thought will find this rewarding; those seeking practical playing tips or concise interviews may not.

As heard by us

A 500th-episode return that treats old-time music as practice, memory, and a way of thinking.

Episode 500 brings Frank Fairfield back into view, recorded at his home in Los Angeles, and Cameron DeWitt treats the return as something worth pausing for.

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You want a 500th-episode homecoming with Frank Fairfield.

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