Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri

8. Indian Old-Time Fiddlers

8 Indian Old-Time Fiddlers Don Warren: I have noticed that a lot of these pretty good musicians have got some Indian in them. Marshall: Is there anything Indian about their fiddling? Warren: Well, no, they seem to play pretty well standard. Idid not expect this to emerge as a major theme. We know little or nothing about what music may have been like among the people here before European contact, and there are few references in the historical record. But when we consider oral and anecdotal history and specific families in Missouri from the early 1800s forward, we find a surprising number of old-time fiddlers with Indian (also called Native American) ancestry. Yet with few exceptions, the subject of today’s old-time fiddlers with Indian ancestry is a new topic, one that presents quandaries as well as new knowledge. This chapter outlines the possibilities of this complex thread in the Missouri old-time fiddler’s experience, based on perspectives of Missourians of Cherokee lineage. Consideration of Indian Missourian fiddlers is in some ways similar to consideration of other ethnic groups—the Germans or the Irish. Indian peoples in Missouri were themselves emigrants and refugees from other places. At the beginning, they migrated from Siberia and then followed waterways inland. Later, tribal groups such as the Cherokee were driven from their eastern homelands by Americans in the early nineteenth century. In colonial times in Upper Louisiana, the French developed the slave trade and made it big business. Although slavery had been discouraged during the Spanish period, slavery existed in the St. Louis area until the early 1800s.1 Many of the St. Louis elite owned slaves, and mixed-blood French and Indian citizens were among the most active slave-owning families ; even Catholic priests owned Indian and African American slaves. The French classified Indian slaves as either “pure-blooded Indian” or “mestizo or mixed-blood,” and Indian slaves primarily served as servants, hunters, and fishermen; African Americans enslaved by the French worked more often as field hands, so Indian slaves often had higher status.2 Indian slave trading declined in the next years. By the 1830s, Indian slavery had ended, and Natives were being moved out. There are no Indian populations in Missouri on ancestral lands speaking ancestral languages, such as those 219 220 Play Me Something Quick and Devilish in Arizona or Nevada. Some Missourians identify themselves as descendants of precontact Native American groups such as the Osage, Missouri, Mandan, Shawnee, and Sac (Sauk) and Fox. There are no historical Indian groups in Missouri whose fiddling today displays distinctive blends of European and Indian elements, such as those in Canada and Alaska. Native music of other varieties—drumming, ritual dance, singing—has attracted interest since the late 1800s, when Edison cylinders of tribal music were recorded by scholars as a way to preserve what they considered moribund cultures inevitably being eroded by contact and change.3 It is impossible to determine what is and what is not “Indian” in the fiddle music today. Their music is intertwined with music of white and African American communities. As Stacy Phillips notes, the theme is still largely a little-noticed niche. “American Indian. A small nook of fiddling is occupied by American Indians. Two distinct, very localized styles are Metis in the upper Midwest (and lower Canada) and the Athabascan, native to the most northeastern corner of Alaska (and abutting Canada). Both derive from a mixture of French, Canadian, and American fiddling, greatly reinterpreted and transformed by Amerindian perception. Some otherwise well-known tunes have been metrically twisted by these fiddlers to fit their dancing and aesthetics.”4 Among exceptions is a study of northern Ontario Metis Indian fiddling— a style and culture of strong Scotch-Irish as well as French inheritance.5 Blanton Owen studied an English Cherokee fiddler in North Carolina, Manco Sneed, who spent most of his life in or near the Cherokee Reservation in the Great Smoky Mountains. Sneed’s repertoire contained only two “Cherokee tunes,” and Owen does not explain Sneed’s shift to “Anglo-style” fiddling (which he calls “intricate and melodically complex”), nor is an answer proposed for the question, “What is Cherokee fiddling?”6 Sneed played modal and “crooked” tunes, as did the late Metis Indian fiddler from Selkirk, Manitoba, Mel Bedard, but so do fiddlers of many cultural backgrounds. Style is the big question. Even though we know Peter Cruzatte, the OmahaFrench Creole member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in...