Tessa Schwartz:
Everyone at Whitman has a story to tell. How they got here and what happened once they did, and every story is different. This is Our Whitman, My story.
Hi, I'm Tessa Schwartz. I'm a sophomore from Berkeley, California, and I'm an intended psych major. Here at Whitman, I'm in a bluegrass band called Big Joe. I'm the fiddle player and I'm here with the rest of my bandmates.
Mya Snyder:
Hi, I'm Mya Snyder. I'm from Gresham, Oregon. I play bass in the bluegrass band, and I'm a sociology major.
Aidan Tribolet:
Hello, I'm Aidan Tribolet. I am from Larkspur, California. I'm an environmental studies politics major, and I play mandolin and a little bit of electric guitar, and just maybe I'll start playing the lap steel.
Gwen Marbet :
My name is Gwen Marbet. I am an environmental studies and geology major and an art minor, and I play guitar and sing in Big Joe.
Tessa Schwartz:
When I was coming to college, I knew that I wanted to start a bluegrass band because I've been playing music my whole life. So I was immediately looking for people to play with, and I've found these three people in very different places.
Gwen Marbet:
Tessa and I had talked over Instagram for a while, so we knew each other virtually before we really came to Whitman. The first day that we met each other, we started playing music together in one of the dorms, and from there, it became Big Joe.
Aidan Tribolet:
I remember Tessa caught me by surprise. I was outside at an event at the beginning of the year where various majors had tables and staff and you can ask questions, and I went over to the music table and told Doug Scarborough that I played a bit of mandolin, and I remember turning around and Tessa was there and like, "Oh, you want to form a bluegrass band?" I said, "Sure."
Mya Snyder:
Well, I was also caught off guard in, I believe, the basement of the campus center, and I recognized Tessa from a class that I had with them, and I said something about a baseline and Tessa was like, "You play bass. You want to join my band?"
Tessa Schwartz:
I was really on the hunt. It was a really funny thing, but I'm glad you all said yes. It's been great.
Mya Snyder:
It worked. It did.
Aidan Tribolet:
Oh, yeah.
Gwen Marbet:
(singing)
Tessa Schwartz:
There's a monthly contra dance that happens in the Reed Ballroom that we play at, so that's really fun. Then we try and get downtown gigs and things like that when we can. Mostly we just play campus events. That's what we really love is seeing our friends and our housemates and our professors and stuff coming to watch us play. I think that's what brings me the most joy.
Gwen Marbet:
Contra dancing is similar to square dancing, but it is also very different. Usually people come and it's anybody, like students. We have community members. Sometimes professors come up and dance too, and it's taught so there's no experience really needed. It's a lot of our friends dancing and learning a pretty traditional style of dance. We play fiddle tunes for everybody to dance to. So usually we're playing for pretty long periods of time and we're keeping track of where people are at in the dance and if they're slowing down and we're adjusting to them as well.
Tessa Schwartz:
Another thing that we started doing, well, last year when we were all freshmen is we started hosting bluegrass jams in dorms. I lived in Anderson, and so we would do them in Anderson, and there would be probably 10 or 15 people in the jam circle. Mostly guitar players, but I say everybody is welcome. Any instrument is welcome as long as you're going to be nice about it, and you're not going to be annoying and bring a big amp and play really loud. But we had flutes and clarinets and things like that, and you just come and sit in the jam circle and I have a bunch of songbooks that I hand out and we just play songs together and learn a little bit about bluegrass and different folk styles.
Then there were probably 20 or 30 people sitting around eating snacks, listening to the music. It's a really great little community event that just brings people together to play music and have fun together.
Gwen Marbet:
I think it's really fun to watch people experience music that they won't usually be listening to because bluegrass is not really something that a lot of people are aware of or listen to. It's kind of seen as old person music or just lumped into the country music category, and it's not something people listen to a lot. So just people walking through the dorm halls and just stopping to listen to a type of music that they haven't heard before is a really valuable experience to be able to give that to other people.
We've had a lot of our friends become really interested in bluegrass and wanting to listen to it or starting to pick up banjo or other folk instruments, and it's really great to see how we're changing people.
(singing).
I am the Editor in Chief of the Whitman Outdoor Journal, which I founded with my friends two years ago, and I also help manage the organic garden on campus, and I'm a part of the Native Plant Restoration Coalition, which is restoring landscaping on Whitman College's campus to be more focused on including native plants that are sustainable and more well adapted to this area.
I don't know, I think there's more somewhere.
Tessa Schwartz:
We do the club, the Folk Music Club.
Gwen Marbet:
Oh, yeah, you can talk about that.
Tessa Schwartz:
So in addition to this band, Gwen and I, along with our friend Tony who plays banjo, we are the presidents of the Folk Music and Dance Club, which is not the same as the band. I try to keep those things separate to prevent conflicts of interest, but that's the group that puts on the contra dances. That organizes them. We did weekly meetings for a while where we talked about different folk styles and things. We had a Cajun singalong night at the French House, which was really fun. So that's the other thing that I'm involved in.
Aidan Tribolet:
Outside of the band, I'm also part of the leadership for the Climate Justice Coalition, which is a club here on campus that is interested in environmental issues that are more social in their nature, and we're trying to create a very inclusive community for thinking about these issues that are often really challenging and rather sometimes grave in their consequences.
Tessa Schwartz:
I am also a part of Whitman's Jazz Band. I am also a writing tutor. I work in the COWS, the Center for Writing and speaking, and I also am a writing fellow, which means that I'm sort of attached to one class this semester. It's a first year seminar, and I've worked with those students over the course of the semester.
So as a writing tutor, I'm in the COWS a couple of hours a week and people can make appointments or they can just drop in, and I work with people on all kinds of stuff, drafting, organizing, brainstorming. We're not a copy editing service, we're not going to do that, but we do revising and all kinds of things, all disciplines, all the class year's presentation. Also, I worked with a student on her Power and Privilege presentation last week, and that was really fun. Workshopping, literal Google Slides and presentation skills and things like that.
Power and Privilege is an event that Whitman puts on every year. They've put it on for some time now. I don't know exactly how long, but it's a day where classes are canceled and students do teach-ins on various kinds of issues of social justice and politics and power and privilege and things like that. It's just a really cool opportunity to hear about issues from student perspectives. Then they also bring in a keynote speaker who's some kind of activist or has interesting thoughts about an issue, and it's a really cool and special thing that Whitman puts on, I think.
We've all got really busy schedules. We all have a lot of things that we have to keep track of. It's a matter of what are my priorities? What are the most important things in my life? Obviously academics has to be somewhere on that list, hopefully near the top when it can be.
I'm really happy that we've all kept this band as high of a priority as it has been because when I started this band, I was like, there's a chance that we're all going to be really busy. It's college. We have things on our plates. I was very much expecting at least one of you to eventually say, "Hey, I'm doing a ton of academics. I need to take this off my plate." But I think we've all been able to have time for each other and for the band, and also to do our classes and our homework and the various clubs and things.
Aidan Tribolet:
I also think it is really exciting to just be busy all the time. To have all these different things to do. I'm working at the theater several hours a week, and then I'm practicing for this. I also take mandolin lessons, so I'm splitting up Big Joe practice with more formal ear training oriented exercises, and there's really never a dull moment.
Tessa Schwartz:
Well, one thing that surprised me about being a student at Whitman is how connected to the Walla Walla community it can be. You maybe sometimes have to look for it yourself, but the people in Walla Walla are really nice and really fun to do things with.
There's a little music scene in Walla Walla. We have our music friends that we go and hang out with, and obviously people come to the contra dances and stuff like that. Just people that you would've never met if you sort of stayed, and people talk about the Whitman bubble a little bit, but it's really easy to get out of that and meet people and just have really great experiences with them.
Gwen Marbet:
Yeah, I agree with Tessa. I think that it's really easy to connect with the greater Walla Walla community, and a lot of the locals also went to Whitman, so I've gotten to meet a lot of people who have gone to Whitman in the 60s who I work with on trail crews, and then also at the farm that I work at, there are a couple of Whitman alums, and it's just great to see how important this place is to people, that this is a place they wanted to stay and that they want to give current students those experiences to help them learn more about what it's like to live here.
Aidan Tribolet:
I think part of the campus character that I've been very pleasantly surprised about is just how approachable and happy and humble students are here. There's no advertising about how smart this and that person is. It's just a small little community. It's very easy to be part of.
Tessa Schwartz:
Or even we were talking about being busy earlier. I feel like there's not a whole lot of like, "Oh, I have so many classes and I'm not getting any sleep." People don't really brag about how busy they are here. Maybe a little bit, but it's not that much I find.
Aidan Tribolet:
Music for this podcast provided by Big Joe, a band made up of Whitman students.
Tessa Schwartz:
For more information, go to whitman.edu/stories. And then altogether, we're Big Joe, 1, 2, 3. We're Big Joe, and this has been Our Whitman. My Story.