This book is a welcome contribution to the literature on regional fiddling traditions in the United States, joining the ranks of such works as Joyce H. Cauthen’s study of the fiddle in Alabama, With Fiddle and Well-Rosined Bow. Howard Marshall carefully chooses the word “fiddlers” in his subtitle rather than “fiddling,” perhaps to signal that his book is about people, seen through the lenses of oral history, biography, and cultural trends, not tune collecting or musical analysis.
Nevertheless, a generous sample of the music itself is included on a Voyager Records CD tucked inside the back cover of the book. The CD is also available as a standalone product. To fans of old-time fiddle music, the thirty-nine tracks of rare, mostly home recordings made from 1955 to 2012 are in themselves worth the price of the book. Transcriptions of twelve of these tunes are used alongside photographs and artwork to illustrate themes developed in the text.
Marshall writes from the perspective of someone who has been involved in Missouri fiddle circles all his life, and supplements his personal experience with abundant research. His writing is jargon-free and will appeal to general audiences. Academic specialists will appreciate that it is carefully documented in copious endnotes amplified by an extensive bibliography and discography.
While the fiddle has often been defined in opposition to the violin, Marshall would rather not make such a sharp distinction, seeing instead a continuum of music made on the instrument by all kinds of people at all levels of musicianship and musical literacy in all kinds of settings. He finds the terms “old-time” and “traditional” to be too vague and limiting, suggestive of backwoods isolation at some distant time in the past, and prefers “vernacular” as more in keeping with a phenomenon that is in fact part of the ebb and flow of the currents of popular culture.
This view of fiddling is an important aspect of the book. In developing his themes he often casts a wide net into such far-flung topics as the trauma of the Civil War, the era of railroad building, Victorian musical literacy, Tin Pan Alley, and the rise of brass bands and ragtime, yet always pulls it back at last to the fiddle. Missouri’s strong tradition of fiddling is seen throughout as both a microcosm of American vernacular music and a funnel through which much of it has passed.
Marshall looks at this complex picture from different perspectives. An important one is that of ethnicity. The book examines the influence of the French, who were the earliest European settlers in the state; the “old-stock” Americans originating in the British Isles, primarily the Scotch-Irish who began moving into the area following the Louisiana Purchase; African American Missourians, whose crucial contributions not just in fiddling but in ragtime and jazz are hard to overstate; Germans, who brought new dance and music forms such as the waltz, polka, and schottische; also the Irish (as distinct from the earlier Scotch-Irish), many of whom arrived as railroad laborers and whose music was propagated through Francis O’Neill’s tune collections; and Native Americans, especially the Cherokee, to whom fiddling has long been important and whose influence is generally acknowledged but difficult to pin down. The book also looks at gender and the disapproval often met by women who played the fiddle, an interesting discussion of an important issue.
Other themes are more historical in perspective. A chapter entitled “Going West” looks back to Thomas Jefferson (himself a violinist/fiddler), the Louisiana Purchase, and the legacy of music related to westward migration beginning with the Lewis and Clark expedition. Much of the traffic was funneled through Missouri via such routes as the Oregon Trail that originated in the state. “Music and Memory in the Civil War Era” looks generally at the impact of the war on Missouri and in some depth at the role of John S. Marmaduke in the Battle of Booneville. Marmaduke later became governor of the state and the namesake of “Marmaduke’s Hornpipe,” a tune so popular that fiddlers call it the “Missouri National Anthem.”
Another important perspective has to do with social trends. A chapter about musical literacy in Victorian times is not strictly about fiddling, but is a delightful excursion that places it squarely in the wider context of popular music of the era, when musical literacy was being spread by educated European (often German) music instructors, the church, sheet music, and the rising popularity of brass “Sousa” bands and community concerts. The book winds up with a look at the impact on old-time fiddling of ragtime and early jazz, genres for which the urban centers of Missouri were among the most important incubators.
Marshall personalizes his historical, social, and cultural themes through the biographies of individual musicians and their family histories. He takes us on entertaining tangents that trace the curious origins of a number of popular Missouri fiddle tunes. It’s a fun and unpredictable ride that is liable to go anywhere, but never fails to shed light on some aspect of fiddling as it exists today in the state of Missouri.
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[Review length: 848 words • Review posted on October 31, 2013]