Anne Grimes spent her life as a musician, performer, archivist, and folksong collector preserving and promoting the musical heritage of Ohio. Throughout her ambitious fieldwork and relentless traveling, she recorded songs by folk singers in nearly all eighty-eight Ohio counties. Grimes, with the help of her daughters, assembled this collection of short stories that tell of her fieldwork experiences with forty musicians and instrument builders who have contributed to her vast collection of recordings and information about American folk music. As a gifted performer in her own right, Grimes traveled the country giving concerts and lectures, and spent time with several well-known folk musicians of the era. Among the stories of her fieldwork in Ohio, she includes brief descriptions of her interactions with Pete Seeger, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and Carl Sandburg, among others. Grimes’s recordings, manuscripts, and photographs that document these personal and fieldwork encounters are now housed at the Library of Congress.
This book is indicative of three significant elements in Grimes’s life: her love for Ohio’s overlooked musical heritage, her fascination with music’s ability to evoke and sustain a local and familiar sense of place—one that connects the performers to an oral tradition strongly associated with Ohio and family lineage—and her fondness for the American dulcimer. Her discussion of the continuity of musical performance across generations, built on associations with place, constitutes the majority of the book’s content. The ways in which she describes her fieldwork experiences and relationships with her contributors reveal her sensitive, caring nature as well as her emotional investment in the music itself. Grimes details the ways in which she located these individuals and traced the origins of the songs that they considered to be their own, or “family songs.” Many of the performances she recorded were derived from versions of the Child Ballads. Grimes is quick to make connections to those versions documented by Francis James Child as well as versions that she had previously recorded throughout her career. There are several instances of these overlapping or related versions found between the limited number of performers included in this book alone.
The information included on the dulcimer is based on Grimes’s encounters with the instrument throughout her career as a performer and scholar. Dulcimer traditions are often associated with the Southern Appalachian region. Grimes has shown, however, that the Ohio dulcimer traditions are “as old and as real” as those found in the South (111), contradicting many folksong scholars’ belief at this time in the early 1950s (10). She sought out high-quality dulcimers, several of which were built by Ohio luthiers discussed in the book. Similar to the songs and ballads of Grimes’s contributors, the dulcimers are discussed in relation to family history and local tradition. She has found that skilled dulcimer builders in various Ohio counties tended to influence the style and construction methods of other local builders. Her extensive collection of dulcimers and other folk instruments resides with the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.
Included with the book is a compact disc containing thirty-three recordings from the Anne Grimes collection. These recordings, taken from Grimes’s fieldwork tapes, correspond with the songs or ballads of her contributors discussed throughout the book. Additionally, Grimes includes a transcription of the lyrics for each song and ballad contained on the disc. The recordings are of excellent quality and should prove valuable for researchers.
Overall, this book would be useful for those individuals seeking to learn more about the life and work of Anne Grimes. It is an extremely condensed version of her biography and work as a performer and scholar but, nevertheless, will serve as a sufficient introduction to her endeavors. Secondly, the book may be helpful in an undergraduate introductory course on folklore, ethnomusicology, or ethnography. For a beginning student and potential future ethnographer, this book provides a good example of how fieldwork and participant-observation often result in a personal investment on the part of the researcher. As ethnographers we may see ourselves and our own histories reflected in those individuals with whom we work and study. This book is evidence that such a personal identification can lead to a lifetime of outstanding and irreplaceable ethnographic work.
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[Review length: 696 words • Review posted on January 26, 2011]