Last night I tagged along with the second Roots Ramble – a ‘musical bar crawl’ taking in roughly one-hour unplugged performances at an independent record store (yes we have one!), a bar and three pubs around east Oxford. It’s a collaborative venture between rising roots/Americana band Swindlestock, much-lauded pure country singer-songwriter Ags Connolly, and no-holds-barred trad bluegrass outfit Francis Pugh and the Whisky Singers. So I went along, joined in on some of the Whisky Singers’ sets to general approval and mostly my own satisfaction, and got involved in the more collective rabble-rousing covers in the last couple of venues as the noise level went up and everyone (very much including the musicians!) tended to be drunker.

And it was fun. And it also at least supports a certain point about my ability to slot in and support, or even collaborate, effectively on very little preparation. My list of potential genres doesn’t actually even include country or bluegrass (maybe I should change that), but the genre specialists I was playing with certainly seemed accepting, particularly of my ‘chugging’ fast-wrist work on more bluegrassy stuff, which Pugh and his very gifted banjo fingerpicker applauded. And that with no more than being told the key, listening hard and the odd glance at someone else’s fretboard.

But, the key question in my current situation, how do I monetise that? There seems to be an almost unbridgeable gap between the musicians who all have day jobs and accept fifty quid between a four-piece if none of them have to spend too much on petrol on the one hand; and the real pros (not stars, ‘blue collar’ musicians, but very insistent on their commercial supplier status), who are unlikely to get on stage for under triple figures including expenses. And undoubtedly fun though jamming with the first group is, I’m starting to realise that networking with them does almost nothing to increase my contact with the second group – who are the only ones in possession of any profit margin to pay additional or dep players.

The final note I think comes from Swindlestock’s guitarist and key instrumentalist Garry Richardson:

If you’re going to try and make money out of music, form a ceilidh band. That’ll be your bread and butter.

Music: even in the individualist 21st-century West, you still can’t expect to go it alone.