The Fiddle, the Upland South, and America's Latest Oldtime Music Revival

Abstract

The fiddle has been a favorite instrument of American musical revolutions. In the Upland South, it heralded revolutions in the early republic, the minstrel stage, the later 19th century, the 1920s, the post-Second World War, and more recently the "oldtime music revival." Each revolution, while reasserting older cultural values, melded ethnic and regional elements into new syntheses, mixing the radically old and the radically new. We folklorists were intimately involved in the latest of these revolutions, the oldtime music revival. This revolution, too, is best understood not as a cultural aberration but as the newest manifestation of an old pattern