Cajun & Creole One-Steps

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Hi, I’m Mitch Reed. Welcome to my vlog and my vlog this week is on Cajun & Creole one-steps. The two one-steps that I’d like to play you right now is a little medley of one-steps that Canray Fontenot played. So these are Creole one-steps. They’re pretty funky, and I thought it would be fun to play them for you and then we could even break them down. I could play them slow and get you to watch the fingerboard so that you could learn these tunes. All right! Let’s go, it’s very fun. So it goes like this [00:35].

All right! So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to lower this camera, bring it up a little bit, and I’m going to play these slowly for you. And there’s actually…these are two tunes. So we will break them into two tunes and then we will put them together. But they are pretty simple. So this is the first one. The first one is called Canray’s One-Step and the second one is called Misery, and it goes like this [02:49].

So those are Canray’s One-Steps…Creole one-steps. Now I’m going to play a tune, this is Dennis McGee’s tune, and he called it The Happy One-Step. I’m going to play it slow and then fast. Watch my fingers and you could pick it up…[05:50]. All right! The Happy One-Step, Dennis McGee. So those were some one-steps. A lot of my friends have been asking about one-steps. I’m not quite sure how they dance to the one-steps but not many people are composing new one-steps anymore. It really was just an old-fashioned dance, an old style dance, played on both accordion and fiddle. But if you listen to Dennis McGee, people like that, Canray Fontenot, they played those types of tunes. So yeah!

Those are three great one-steps that are a lot of fun to play. So hope you enjoyed it today, my vlog on one-steps. Wish I knew more history but here’s one little story I’ll leave you with: I was hanging out with Canray one time…it was either Canray or maybe Calvin Carrière? He said that the one-steps, people would line up across the room and they would just take one step at a time till the person all the way at the end would hit the wall and then they would go back to the other wall. So he said they would dance those dances when the rooms were really filled with people because it was hard to couple dance. So they would do one-steps. Same time signature, 4/4, but you can play them slow and funky; a slow drag. You can play them fast too… either way it works.

Okay, so thank you so much for joining me today. Stay inspired, go visit my website MitchReedFiddleLessons.com where I break down many, many more old style, new style, different Cajun and Creole fiddle tunes. Stay inspired, keep on fiddling and hope to see you out there soon. Thank you.