In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri by Howard Wight Marshall
  • Chris Goertzen
Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri. By Howard Wight Marshall. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 400, preface, acknowledgments, list of interviews, list of transcriptions, notes, selected bibliography, discography, index to text, index to companion CD, CD: Voyager Records VRCD 377.)

This long, untidy labor of love immediately has become this reviewer’s favorite exploration of American fiddling. Marshall, an emeritus art professor and prolific writer on vernacular architecture, has been a fiddler all of his life. He keeps this book suitable for both “academic specialists and interested citizens” by eschewing “academic theories in disciplines concerned with traditional American music” (p. xi). Instead, he luxuriates in intimate details of social and cultural history, particularly as revealed in the life stories of an impressive parade of fiddlers. The broader narrative carries Missouri fiddle history through the 1920s, but many of those biographies bring us much closer to the present. Marshall manages the breadth of Missouri’s fiddling traditions by taking a regional focus. Similar to many studies of American fiddling, Marshall’s regional approach is also evident in historical treatments of fiddling as well as in various tune collections written by other researchers.

Marshall’s introduction provides a useful description of the principal regional styles of old-time fiddling in Missouri. From the southern part of the state, they consist of Ozark, Little Dixie, and North Missouri styles. Marshall then outlines a cultural history of this music and shows how it was built around waves of immigration. The chapter titles are, in turn, “Fiddle Music in the Old French District,” “Going West,” “The Old-Stock Americans” (emphasizing pioneer stock moving across the United States, mostly with Scots-Irish roots), “African American Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri,” “Music and Memory in the Civil War Era,” and “The Irish and the Railroads in Post-Civil War Rural Missouri.” Marshall places the next chapter, “Indian Old-Time Fiddlers,” late in the book because Missouri’s Native population issues from the mass removals of the late 1830s, and he then concludes his volume with chapters titled “Musical Literacy in Victorian Times” and “Traditional Fiddling and the Dawn of Jazz,” which show how sheet music and mass media have influenced fiddling.

Each reader will be rewarded differently. This reviewer savored bits of biography that marked cusps in the history of American fiddling. Here are two favorites: First, Milo McCubbin was a teenaged member of a subsistence-level farming family in the 1930s. He began playing the fiddle by making do with a three-quarter-size metal instrument. When he wanted to step up and own an actual violin, he saved money by trapping possums and selling their pelts. This endeavor allowed him to spend five dollars on an instrument that he ordered through the Montgomery Ward catalog (pp. 84–5). It’s important to understand this account within its historical backdrop. This period continued to witness a diminishing interest in fiddling within the upper reaches of the socio-economic ladder, but this trend was balanced, as fiddles were also becoming increasingly affordable to the rural poor. In a second example, fiddler LeRoy Haslag was a representative of “the old German American community,” but he was also active in a new minstrel-descended “opry” (p. 151). Haslag characterized a contest he entered in 1961 as having been among the last in which novelty tunes such as “Listen to the Mockingbird” were allowed and where judges took into account the level of audience applause (p. 153). Such changes mark an important articulation in that era’s revival of fiddling. The tradition’s insiders were taking over the design and administration of contests because they found that [End Page 235] they could no longer take for granted that the general populace would have a nuanced knowledge of traditional music. In these types of accounts, we see how the modern fiddle subculture was starting to coalesce.

Today, we largely think of American fiddling as something that a few thousand post-ethnic whites pursue as an invigorating exercise in wholesome nostalgia. There may be a...

pdf

Share