Guest performer fiddles around with poetry

By Tesla Rodriquez
Cardinal Staff

Using the same fiddle that he first began with, Ken Waldman sang various poems while playing his foot-tapping beat on the fiddle, on Sept 8.

Jesse Downs, a friend of Waldman’s, helped out with his fiddle and banjo. Waldman’s poems ranged from being funny and amusing to sad and thoughtful. One poem began, “Well I don’t drink, and I don’t smoke and I don’t pet no billy goat!” With his sayings, Waldman soon had the crowd chuckling at his jokes.

To go along with his amusing poems, there was a fair amount of serious poems to make the audience think. Some of Waldman’s poems dealt with issues he had faced in his home state of Alaska, such as fighting the cold and dealing with limited resources.

Waldman moved to Alaska in 1985, only four years after he began to play the fiddle at the age of 25. He actually came across his first fiddle when a stranger at a party was giving one away for free. He grabbed it and has enjoyed playing the fiddle ever since.

Waldman got the idea to combine poems and fiddling when he was asked to read one of his poems about playing the fiddle. Instead of reading about fiddling, he decided to do them both at once. Since then, Waldman has written six books of poetry and one children’s book, and he has recorded nine CDs.