Routes & Roots: Fiddle & Dance Studies from around the North Atlantic 4 Ed. by Ian Russell and Chris Goertzen (review)

Routes & Roots is the fourth in a series of collected papers from the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention (NAFCo). Taken together, this series has gone a long way toward filling the void that once existed in traditional fiddle-music and dance scholarship. Not only do these volumes provide a substantial range of topics covering nearly every aspect of the field, but the notes and extensive bibliographies are treasure troves for scholars.

I became acutely aware of this void in the late 1990s while working on a major fiddle-music related project. Much of my research activity involved tracking down and digesting the contents of unpublished dissertations and masters theses, then eagerly combing their bibliographies for further leads. Aside from the odd piece in JAF and Ethnomusicology or occasional area study, most of the listings I found referred me to brief excerpts from memoirs and historical works, or decades-old articles in newspapers, newsletters, and defunct popular periodicals. If the NAFCo series had been available to me then, my labors would have been eased considerably.

The brainchild of Dr. Ian Russell of the University of Aberdeen, NAFCo is a biennial event initiated in 2004. Its genius is that it is both academic conference and folk festival. The convention brings together scholars of traditional fiddle music and dance with some of the world’s major practitioners of those arts. I had the privilege of attending two of these events and can attest that the atmosphere can be electric. Scholars and performers are energized and inspired by mutual exposure. Furthermore, at NAFCo, there is no hard line separating scholarly and musical pursuits. Some performers are tapped to offer papers, and some academics are also gifted practitioners in the fields of traditional music or terpsichore.

Routes & Roots represents the output of the 2010 Conference, which took place in Aberdeen. As the title implies, its particular focus is how local music and dance traditions have been transformed, either through the passage of time or by being carried to new locales and cultural settings. As noted by co-editors Russell and Goertzen, there is a further implication that derives from the order in which these two homophones are presented. Musical identity “is as much a product of cultural encounters and experiences outside of group or cultural life, as it reflects ‘trueness’ to tradition” (p. 2). The central point here is that the acquisition and elaboration of music and dance traditions may never have been a purely local phenomenon. It may well have depended as much on the coursing through of outside influences as on immediate person-to-person transmission. Even more to the point, as many of the papers in this anthology attest, it no longer makes sense to talk of “pure” traditions in the North Atlantic region, where virtually all contemporary manifestations of traditional music and dance have incorporated significant elements from the outside—either from other North Atlantic music and dance traditions or from Western popular music and dance.

The 14 studies that make up this collection offer a wide array of cultural areas, subjects, and research methods. Two pieces—by Lisa Morrissey and Colette Maloney, respectively—center on archival research and describe the careers of two important but hitherto relatively obscure Irish tune collectors: Patrick Weston Joyce and Frank Roche.

Four articles are largely based on data gathered through personal observation and collected oral histories. Gregory Hansen shows how fiddler Richard Keith Seaman’s manner of stage presentation at contemporary folk festivals was shaped by his participation in the fiddling and square dance scene that flourished in parts of Florida during the first half of the twentieth century. Samantha Breslin describes how a local fascination with Irish jigs and reels gleaned from media sources has all but taken over the traditional music session scene in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Lesley Ham details...