North American Fiddle Music: A Research and Information Guide (review)

The European violin, also called the fiddle, has been played by informally trained musicians for as long as they have been able to get their hands on them. As the violin spread throughout the court orchestras of Europe, it was also adopted to folk music and folk purposes. In the New World, fiddlers are recorded since at least the sixteenth century. Its resonant, vocal-like sound made it appealing and adaptable to many musical purposes and aesthetics. In North America, its portability allowed it to be carried to the frontier as the continent was settled. It has been adapted to many of the folk musics of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Though it is often closely associated in the popular imagination with white rural culture, as in country and bluegrass music, the fiddle was a popular instrument for African Americans, Native Americans and various waves of European immigrants. In the late twentieth century, the fiddle was taken up by new generations of musicians who participated in the revivals of old-time, folk, klezmer, and Cajun traditions. Research and writings on the instrument and its many styles are found in scholarly journals, to be sure, but more often in more informal venues such as newspaper and magazine articles and liner notes. Drew Beisswenger’s North American Fiddle Music is an annotated bibliographic guide to the published research on the various fiddle musics of the continent. Beisswenger includes books, articles, liner notes, and Internet resources. His stated preference is for “[s]ubstantive published research and historically important tune collections . . . [s]ources that integrate social and biographical information, and sources that explore how fiddlers interact with their communities” (p. xv). Short promotional pieces and obituaries are among the briefer works that are excluded. Beisswenger also excludes most tune-history studies, arguing that the web site “The Fiddler’s Companion” (http://www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/ [accessed 12 January 2012]) has effectively compiled this information in one location. In addition to the full bibliographic information, Beisswenger provides brief summaries of most of the listed works. Many older resources are now available for free on the Internet, and Beisswenger helpfully provides that information when appropriate. Web resources and video recordings are also included.

Due to the various ways fiddlers have of referring to their music, and the approaches researchers take to defining music, no one taxonomy will serve to divide the entirety of fiddle music research. In organizing his mass of information, Beisswenger, an academic librarian and author of an excellent study of old-time fiddler Melvin Wine (Drew Beisswenger, Fiddling Way Out Yonder: The Life and Music of Melvin Wine [ Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002]), has divided the world of North American fiddling along generic, ethnic, and geographic (national or regional) lines. Wisely, Beisswenger chose to place items according to the most prominent category assigned by the researcher. Works that encompassed fiddling in general, or that could not be connected to any one genre, ethnicity, or national or regional group, are included in the first section, “Major General Categories.” This section includes earlier bibliographies and discographies, tune collections, Web sources, and an “Open Listing” section for items that addressed multiple categories or that do not have an emphasis on any particular category. Of these subcategories, the largest collection is that of tune books, with several sources listed from the nineteenth century.

The next section gathers works on specific genres of fiddle music. These are bluegrass, blues and rock (grouped together), contest, country, jazz and progressive (grouped together), minstrelsy, old-time, Western swing and cowboy. Bluegrass has by far the largest number of resources listed, but the listings for old-time and country are extensive as well. This section also includes listings of resources on fiddle-related dance music, and a brief listing of fiction works about fiddlers and scholarly studies of fiddlers in fiction.

As some fiddlers connect their music to their ethnic group rather than to a region or...