Gregory Hansen provides a thoughtful, multi-faceted portrait of the life and repertoire of fiddler, storyteller, and retired railroad worker Richard Seaman. Born in 1904 in Kissimmee Park, Florida, Seaman wove a telling collection of fiddle tunes and tall tales that was shaped and reshaped in the contexts of community, conviviality, and cultural understanding until the time of his death at the age of ninety-seven. Like Wendell Berry’s masterful novel, The Memory of Old Jack, Hansen crafts his text as a series of closely observed vignettes and character aspects to unfold the story and the significance of a long, rich, and deeply situated life.
Like Berry, Hansen opens with a present-tense evocation of a man in old age at home in his community, in this case Jacksonville, Florida, on the day when the folklorist first encountered him. The book’s introduction fleshes out the tale of their meeting and sets up the argument and structure of Hansen’s study of the man. Early on, Hansen plays at being the pedant with sentences like: "Analyzing performances using constructs to systemize performances into a speaker’s use of communicative norms, roles, genres, texts, purposes, and other facets of discourse provide heuristic guidelines for research."
He quickly relegates such overly theoretical language to the notes and instead “organizes the book in terms of performances and statements of competence that make sense to both Richard and me.” Hansen makes clear that he intends the examination of Seaman’s life and art not as mere biography or as an examination of a “typical” Florida fiddler but as an exploration of the ways that one’s art and one’s existence form meaning and reveal values in place and over time. Through eleven chapters, a postscript, a section of tune transcriptions, another of photographs, and a valuable collection of endnotes, Hansen then concisely sets to work to honor the man and his gifts.
In the first chapter, he pulls back the curtain to reveal Richard Seaman in performance at a local arts festival in Jacksonville in 1992 showing how on such occasions he weaves together his fiddling with anecdotes that reveal aspects of his life story and of the carefully chosen tunes. In the second chapter, Hansen draws on a series of interviews to reveal more of Seaman’s life story, especially his early days in the rural community of Kissimmee Park and the role of the fiddle and the dance there in the early twentieth century. Chapter 3 again reveals Richard Seaman in performance, this time in a workshop setting where he is paired with two other important Florida fiddlers, George Custer and the legendary Chubby Wise, and we listen in as they share tunes and observations. That chapter is followed by a collection of Richard’s tall tales and then by an exploration of his working life from his earliest days on the family farm through his move to the city and the life of a railroad worker, his post-retirement repair shop, and the work of trying to keep a band together. In a number of ways, these first five chapters set the stage and reveal the character of the man.
Chapters 6 and 7 examine Seaman’s fiddle, his technique, and his core repertoire, and provide the heart of the book. Here is also Hansen’s finest writing and his closest reading of the role of music in the life of Richard Seaman up until he laid the fiddle aside upon the death of his son and didn’t touch it for thirty years. He took the instrument up again at the age of eighty-two in the new context of folklife programming such as the festivals and workshops already examined and the folklife-in-education work, which is the subject of the eighth chapter. Hansen next examines Seaman in the context of the darker aspects of Florida history and culture including the roles of race, representation, and cultural hegemony. Significantly, this chapter’s title echoes that of the book as a whole, and it and the one that follows draw into bold relief the problematic nature of those who would see an individual as overly emblematic. Instead, Hansen draws his work to a close with an examination of what Seaman himself feels is the significance and usefulness of his artistry and the joy of new love even in the twilight years of life.
The book can stand proudly alongside such seminal portraits as Roger Abrahams’s work with Almeda Riddle, Sandy Ives on Joe Scott, and Henry Glassie’s people of Balleymenone. Quibbles are trifling. KVOO, the Tulsa radio station where Bob Wills was the king of western swing, is transcribed as KBOO. A sketch map of Kissimmee Park and perhaps of the Jacksonville neighborhood would have been a helpful addition for those of us who know the state less well than Hansen obviously does. What is of greater importance is that the book be read and recognized for what it is, a fine evocation of music, memory, and meaning. Like Wendell Berry’s Old Jack Beachum, Hansen’s vision of Richard Seaman and his ninety-plus years shows the small, important monument of one well-tended life in the fertile ground of its community.
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[Review length: 850 words • Review posted on June 28, 2007]