BIOGRAPHY

Playing a fiddle for a living for nearly forty years is even more fun than it would seem. Despite all the ups and downs, dozens of burnouts, some pain and disappointment, the fiddle still calls from its place on the wall every single day. It has a golden glow that promises adventure, and delivers, more and more with each passing year.

David Greely took up the fiddle at 17, after hearing Richard Greene play through an amp with a wa-wa pedal in concert at the Warehouse in New Orleans, when Seatrain opened for Black Sabbath. The next day, in a Baton Rouge pawnshop a couple of blocks from where he was born, he bought a Japanese plywood fiddle and two brand-new $35 bows. Rosin applied, strings tuned to an open G chord, he figured out how to play a recognizable version of the "Sally Goodin" that he'd heard the night before, and made up two more tunes before supper. It was the easiest instrument he'd ever tried to play. David had gone from "Iron Man" to "Sally Goodin'" in less than 24 hours.

The fiddle beckoned every day, the novel sound produced by pulling rosined hair across the strings, the notes that bent and slid so much more easily than the guitar or harmonica. Even with every tune in G (he didn't learn to tune it for a year) it was endlessly productive and fascinating. His mother wasn't quite as enthralled, and banished the fiddle to his bedroom or the backyard, though she seemed pleased that David had taken up the same instrument as her French-speaking Cajun father, Eddie Thériot.

The fiddle also opened up a new connection between David and his father, Roscoe, who had grown up on Angola prison, where Ambrose Greely, David's grandfather, worked as a guard in the 1930s. Roscoe had lived around convicts most of his early life, talking with them, fishing with them, and hearing them sing work songs, blues and gospel, which imbued him with unerring good taste in music. David had heard his father's rich baritone singing great country, blues and gospel songs from before he could remember. Roscoe noticed early that David could sing, and by the time he was 3 he was expected to sing for company, usually "Sixteen Tons," complete with finger snapping. David later sang tenor in a gospel quartet that performed in small, strange churches all over Livingston Parish, until his voice changed, and the tenor part became unreachable.

Within weeks after finding the fiddle, he'd been invited to join his first band, Cornbread, and had suddenly become interesting to women. This was going to work out well. Cornbread toured between Colorado and New Orleans, playing hardcore bluegrass and western swing.

Instead of seeking out Ozzy Osbourne for inspiration, David sought out old musicians. He went from folk rock to folk, his passion for history compelling him burrow deeper into the days when music was the only escape from a life of hard labor. He became infected with the same peace and reverie he saw on the faces of those old musicians whenever they played all those old tunes, and, at about the age of 19, he realized that he wanted to be just like those old men.

"I figured that, by the year 2000, I'd be about 46 years old, and starting to be able to do what I really wanted to do with a fiddle, and I was just about right."

One November Saturday in the late '80s David went to the Savoy Music Store jam session in Eunice, LA, where he met and played music with a 95 year-old fiddler named Denis McGee, and an 18 year-old accordion player named Steve Riley. David and Steve formed a band that became known as Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, and they have spent the past 20-plus years together traveling literally around the world, searching archives for tunes, writing songs, making records and getting nominated for Grammies. They spend half the year in Louisiana Dance halls, where audiences vote with their feet: on the dance floor or out the door. The other half is spent on the road, playing folk festivals and concert halls.

Now, nearly 20 years after his apprenticeship to Dewey Balfa, and burrowing deep into the Cajun music of his ancestry, David is more fascinated than ever, for more reasons. Cajun music is not only what his family played, it happens to be where his soul finds itself most at home. "I believe in tribal memory, and find my emotions moved more by Cajun melodies than by any other form of music. It's a blend of ancient tones, black, white and rural. It's rooted in the French language, so its rhythms tend to swing. In it I find everything I need to express myself musically."

David's main recording violin was made by Thomas G. Sparks in 2004. In 2008 he found a large Eastern European violin with a faux label that he calls "The Bear," which he uses primarily for Cajun low tuning onstage.