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Blackmon makes
fiddle magic again.
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Still
recovering from a broken neck that left him
temporarily paralyzed, David Blackmon, the man
whose fiddle stylings have been heard with
everyone from Widespread Panic to Jerry Reed,
returned to the stage at Smith's Olde Bar in
Atlanta on Thursday, May 18th for a show with the
Emma Gibbs Band. Blackmon walked onto the stage
with a cane and the help of band members, but
when he put bow to violin there was no need for
crutches of any kind.
The news of Blackmon's broken neck was
well-circulated, but the details of how it was
broken were not. He says, "I took a weird
fall playing frisbee and I just tripped over a
tree root. It was a fall that anyone else could
take, but apparently I was a disaster waiting to
happen. It was either a birth defect or playing
the fiddle for so long, but my sixth and seventh
vertebrae had deteriorated to the point where it
didn't take much at all to snap them. Basically
they disintegrated."
Blackmon says that he had experienced some back
trouble in the past, but never knew the degree of
the problem. "I had a stenosis of the spine,
where your spinal cord is not big enough for your
spinal column. The stenosis was something that
had been pending for a long time and I didn't
know it. Its one of those things that you grow
into and learn to work around and you never know
you have it. I just knew I had severe back ache
from time to time. I had MRIs done and everything
looked pretty much okay, certainly nothing to
lead to the kind of pain that I was having, but
nobody knew to check my cervical area. I got that
part corrected about a month and a half ago, and
then my left side started coming around to where
I could play fiddle again," he says.
Blackmon reports that for several weeks he was
paralyzed from the neck down, but with constant
physical therapy he's getting his fiddling chops
back. "Its not near where I want it to be,
but at the same time its a start. It gets better
every day and I just thank the good Lord for
giving me a second chance."
It was fitting that David Blackmon would make his
first appearance on the live stage with
Winston-Salem's Emma Gibbs Band because he had
just recorded fiddle for two tracks on their CD,
SevenEven, two weeks before the accident. "I
met up with those guys at a recording session at
John Keane Studios. I've done a lot of work in
his studio, and they gave me a call and asked if
I wanted to play with them on their record. I
said, 'Sure.' We jelled so well together that we
always stayed in touch." Does he see himself
becoming a full-fledged Emma Gibbs Band member?
"I don't know about that, that I have to
leave that up to those guys, but I'll be glad to
play with them anytime they want me to."
David Blackmon began his fiddling career at the
age of nine when he joined the Clarke County
Youth Orchestra in Athens, Georgia. From there he
began accompanying his banjo-playing brother on
upright bass at local talent shows before
swapping the bass for a mandolin. The bowman
emphasizes that he learned to truly
"fiddle" after his time with the
orchestra, explaining the difference is,
"The orchestra (violin) chops and the fiddle
chops are very different because when you're
fiddling you have to be able to improvise over
any and every chord change. In orchestra violin,
unless its written out for you, it just doesn't
happen."
At the age of 21 he was called by country
singer/actor Jerry Reed to join his brother in
Reed's touring band on mandolin, fiddle and
guitar. The ace fiddler later left Nashville and
returned to Athens to get a degree in Dairy
Science. His music career gained new steam in
Athens when he became a member of the Normaltown
Flyers, who signed a two-record deal with Mercury
Records. He also became a regular call for
producer John Keane (R.E.M., Widespread Panic)
when a song needed traditional instrumentation.
More recently Blackmon has played with Widespread
Panic and was an original member of Blueground
Undergrass. |
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