Fit as a Fiddle!

To quote the grandparents of every budding angsty teenager, “Kids these days.” This is a classic phrase used by the wiser generation when describing their usual disappointments in the current generation. Kids these days listen to music that has no meaning, does damage to the brain, or influences our view of the world. It was true when Elvis Presley became popular, and it is still true today. Let’s face it, usually the only people that like the music of the current generation are the “youngins” of that generation. It is rare that you would find teens of this time period listening to anything besides what is played on the radio, or what is currently popular among their peers. That being said, I think it’s safe to say it couldn’t hurt to add a bit of Missouri culture to our lives! Let’s put our iPods aside for the moment and introduce something different into our musical repertoire. It’s time to get fit as a fiddle and listen to some “quick and devilish” traditional fiddle music with a man who lives and breathes the art of fiddling, Howard Wight Marshall!  --Kimberly Ring , Intern, University of Missouri Press

Play Me Something Quick and Devilish explores the heritage of traditional fiddle music in Missouri. Howard Wight Marshall considers the place of homemade music in people’s lives across social and ethnic communities from the late 1700s to the World War I years and into the early 1920s. This exceptionally important and complex period provided the foundations in history and settlement for the evolution of today’s old-time fiddling.

Beginning with the French villages on the Mississippi River, Marshall leads us chronologically through the settlement of the state and how these communities established our cultural heritage. Other core populations include the “Old Stock Americans” (primarily Scotch-Irish from Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia), African Americans, German-speaking immigrants, people with American Indian ancestry (focusing on Cherokee families dating from the Trail of Tears in the 1830s), and Irish railroad workers in the post–Civil War period. These are the primary communities whose fiddle and dance traditions came together on the Missouri frontier to cultivate the bounty of old-time fiddling enjoyed today.

Excerpt Pages 1-9

“This phenomenally entertaining and glorious volume should grace the library of every musician and historian. Bravo, Professor Marshall!” 
                          – Mary McWay Seaman, The Celtic Connection

Meet the Author

Howard Wight Marshall is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Missouri, Columbia and former director of the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Barns of Missouri: Storehouses of History. He lives near Fulton, Missouri.

Links to: Audio Interview, Blogs, and Fiddling

Marshall's Blog Fiddling Missouri

Play Me Something Quick and Devlish Facebook Page

Audio Interview

Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri Part 1

Watch a Video Performance of "Whistling Rufus"

In this clip from the 2001 house concert at KOPN, Leroy Canaday plays a great old country rag called "Whistling Rufus," one of his favorites and a tune discussed in Play Me Something Quick and Devilish. Canday's performance style well represents the hard-driving "Little Dixie style" of Missouri fiddling.  

Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri Part II: Taylor McBaine

Watch a Video Performance of "Climbing the Stairs the Monkey"

Taylor McBaine fiddles one of the first tunes he learned as a child of six or seven, “Climbing the Stairs the Monkey,” an old favorite in Missouri and known by other titles, such as “Moss Billy” and “Shelby’s Mule.” Just as he had learned it as a young beginning fiddler, McBaine favored this tune as a teaching tune when he, in turn, passed the music on to others.

Q: What inspired you to consider writing "Play Me Something Quick and Devilish"?

My inspiration has always been the people, stories, and grassroots history behind the music people make. I learned to appreciate all kinds of music, and admiration of my grandfather Wiley Marshall has always been a driving force behind my interest in “the fiddle”; he was the principal fiddler in our family when I was a child, but there have been fiddlers in the family in central Missouri since the 1830s.

I began playing traditional music as a teenager in the 1960s in the “Folk Music Boom.” (At the same time, I was devoted to modern jazz.) After coming out of the military in 1966, I returned to college in Missouri and soon became dedicated to recording and understanding, as well as performing and listening to, “old-time music.” In grad school at Indiana (Folklore Institute), I concentrated on material culture and folk architecture, and my career took me to museums, the Library of Congress, Kansas State University, and finally to the University of Missouri. My principal pastime through the years, however, has been performing and studying traditional music. This book and CD are the result of a life devoted to traditional music and grassroots culture.

Q: What did you learn from writing this book?

Several aspects of the world of traditional music have barely been scratched by researchers in Missouri. These aspects include such areas as African American fiddlers and their legacy today, the role of fiddlers with Native American ancestry (of which there are many in Missouri), the so-called brass band movement after the Civil War and its relationship to fiddling, musical literacy in the late Victorian Age, the role of immigrant German-speaking music teachers in small towns, and the role of Tin Pan Alley compositions in the traditional fiddlers’ repertoire; these and other seldom-studied subjects are explored in Play Me Something Quick and Devilish.

Read More Q&A

Sneak Peek!

Prairie Sky: A Pilot's Reflections on Flying and the Grace of Altitude by W. Scott Olsen will be available in three to four weeks.  Pre-order it today! 

 

Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology.  W. Scott Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground.  While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the midwestern sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic--the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna.

Excerpt: 

Thin Places and Thick Time

A Duet for Two Worlds

“Ready to go flying?” I ask.

“Absolutely.”

“Think I know how to do this?”

Roy Hammerling, a religion professor at the college, sits in the right seat as the Skyhawk enters the runway.

“I’m counting on it,” he says.

The throttle goes forward, and the airplane begins to run down the centerline. It’s a beautiful day for flying. Clear sky and bright sun. A gentle breeze from the north. Huge distances between the very small clouds. The type of day where chasing an idea with an airplane seems perfectly logical and sane. At 60 knots I ease back on the yoke, the nose lifts, and then the rest of the airplane follows. We begin a gentle climbing turn to the west.

“I love that initial feeling,” Roy says. “It’s like you’re tethered to the ground, and then all of a sudden you break free.”

Roy and I are on an expedition this morning, a mission, a voyage of discovery. We are looking for the place where everything changes, the place where the very behavior of the physical earth changes direction. There are signs on the ground that point to the spot, but when you are standing there, the shift is too subtle to see. We are looking for a line reaching back to Pleistocene catastrophe and forward into ecology and myth. We are looking for the Laurentian Divide. And we are looking for something else as well.

Below us the land is green where crops have sprouted, brown where the plants are still emerging. We’ve had three days of hard rain, and overland water moves toward the Maple and Sheyenne and Red Rivers, streams today in depressions you can measure but never see.

“I am always amazed by the takeoff,” he says. “When I was a little kid, I used to imagine it was like there were ropes around the airplane, and you had to break away. And there is this sense of—I don’t know—elation when you break free.”

There is such a thing as accidental genius, I think. Hunting for geology, the normal thing would be to invite a geologist. But the Laurentian Divide in North Dakota is nothing like the Great Divide running the length of the Rocky Mountains. There is no leap and swooning of summit and valley here. Subtle at best, invisible at worst, the Laurentian Divide is more idea than rock, but the evidence of its presence is overwhelming. I mentioned this in a hallway once, and Roy got interested.

If you are looking for the invisible, I think, invite a theologian. I level the wings just fifteen hundred feet over the ground. Traffic on the interstate is light. An egret flies southbound below us.

“I always felt there was a bit of a metaphor for spiritual life in that,” Roy continues. “In the sense that what people always want is a sense of joy or happiness. But there’s always these things tethering you down to the ground. You can’t get away from it. I have a friend who’s a pilot, and I’ve gone up with him a few times. I always have this sense of freedom in flying.”

We’ve begun this conversation a thousand times. In my office, in his office, in hallways and lunch lines, we get to talking about flying and about the small insistent sense that something else is happening beyond the shape of air moving over wings. But then we’ve always paused.

“In the airplane,” I’ve said. “I want to hear what you think while we’re actually flying.”

When I told him I was going to try to find the divide, something huge and historic and mostly invisible unless you’re looking for it, and even then damn near impossible to fix precisely, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. We’ve delayed this conversation so long, it nearly erupts.

“Do you know what that means?” he asks. “That feeling at takeoff?”

“Transformation,” I say. “It’s a leap of faith, perhaps a leap into faith. It’s your mind telling your body to relax—the physics and the math work pretty well.”

“Some people never get over that fear, though,” he says. “Some people can never make that leap. Just like some people sometimes in the religious life never get over certain fears; they build up regulations and walls and rules. They do things that keep them from flying. And it seems to me that the spiritual life is about letting go, is about being free and trusting. There is a sense of mystery about it. There is always a sense of mystery. Like right now, I look over, and you don’t even have your hands on the controls.”

I smile and point at the autopilot in the panel.

“Oh,” he says, laughing. “See? Mystery explained by a higher power.”

I remember a map I have at home that shows the rock underneath the Dakota soils. Like nearly every map, it’s an aerial perspective. Archean basement rock, billions of years old, from the time when continents first formed and life, nonnucleated single-celled hopes called prokaryotes, first appeared, hides under Fargo. Heading west, however, the rock quickly becomes Cretaceous. The rock of Tyrannosaurus rex. The rock of Giganotosaurus and Triceratops. The rock of Pangaea’s breakup. The rock of the Western Interior Seaway, an ocean in the middle of the continent. The rock of a meteor falling on the Yucatán and killing nearly everything. Keep going west and the rock keeps getting younger. But none of it is visible now. The planet cooled. The glaciers came, scraped every hilltop, and filled every valley with gravel and sand. An ice sheet named Laurentide pushed the Missouri River valley into shape. And when the glaciers moved back, the meltwater Lake Agassiz, the largest inland sea in North American history, deposited sediment and clay. There are marks in the North Dakota soil that reveal where icebergs trapped in retreating pack ice scraped the lake-bottom sediment. You cannot see them from the ground.

“You know,” I say, “I have been told that there is not one single description in the Bible of an angel in the act of landing. There is one scene where a couple of them are zipping around a living room, but otherwise they are almost always in the air. And if they are on the ground, they are frequently in disguise, appearing as commonplace humans. So it would be possible to argue that their true appearance, the place where they can reveal their true nature, is airborne. It may be forcing the idea a bit, coming from a pilot, but it does strike me that there is something intuitive there. Something true about the human character.”

“You can think of Ezekiel being taken up in the fiery chariot, of Jesus’s ascending into clouds, and it lends itself to the idea that heaven and the holy are somewhere above.”

“These guys don’t just dissolve,” I say. “They don’t just fade away into some other state of being. They rise. They take off. They fly.”

“Saint Augustine,” Roy says, “in his Confessions has this great line. He says something like ‘Oh, God, are you the God of the heavens? And if so, are the birds more holy because they fly closer to you?’ He knows that God is in some type of heavenly place. But the question is, where is that place?”

“Today,” I say, “it’s fifteen hundred feet over Dakota farmland.”

“Perhaps not,” Roy says. “Augustine concludes that the way people need to fly like birds is to go within.” He looks out the window. “But I will admit, if Augustine had a Cessna, he might have changed his mind.”

Author Spotlight: Eugene Webb

Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological Development by Eugene Webb

Worldview and Mind covers a wide range of thinkers and movements to explore the relation between religion and modernity in all its complexity. Eugene Webb invokes a number of topical issues, including religious terrorism, as he unfolds the phenomenon of religion in all its complications, from the difference between faith and belief to the diversities among—and within—religions.

What drew you to write about this complex topic?

One of the writers I talk about, Robert Kegan, has described our modern world as one in which many of us find ourselves “in over our heads,” overwhelmed both by competing visions of life in our pluralistic world and by the demands of mental development these make on us.  I conceived my book as a kind of guide for the perplexed that would help people deal with these challenges by showing the reciprocal relation between the worldviews we hold and the minds we develop and hold them with.  It is a book not about what to think but about how to think--that is, about what is involved in the process of thinking carefully and critically about issues of ultimate meaning and value.

What is the difference between faith and belief?

Since the rise of modern science in about the seventeenth century, the word belief has taken on the rather narrow meaning of holding opinions, usually with insufficient evidence.  In its root meaning, as Wilfred Cantwell Smith showed, believe is cognate to the German belieben, meaning to cherish or hold dear.  The root in Latin is similar: credo (I believe) is formed from cor (heart) + do (I give).  It is in modern usage, therefore, that the two words diverge.  In their original meanings they were quite close, with faith referring to loving trust and loyalty under conditions of uncertainty.  In the book I discuss St. Thomas Aquinas’s conception of living faith (fides formata) as animated by love, as compared with dead faith (fides informis), which lacks animation by love.  The word belief, in modern usage, tends to be understood as referring to the latter.

What are the basic steps we can take to be more tolerant of others’ beliefs?

One key element, I think, it to recognize that all worldviews are developed by interpretation and that careful thinking in any domain requires a willingness to consider different possibilities of interpretation.  Another is to recognize that religions tend to address questions that have no simple and straightforward answer, so that alternative symbolisms may be helpful in further illuminating the areas of mystery and spiritual experience religions are concerned with.

Why do you think religion has had such a huge impact on society since as far back as religion dates? What is it about us that makes religion such a big part of our lives?

I think human beings have a basic thirst for meaning that is all-encompassing in its reach.  Religions are not the only way people can try to satisfy this thirst, but religions, at least at their best, tend to be the most open to living in the face of mystery.

In your introduction you say, “Almost every person alive today is aware that there are people who hold visions of life different from his or her own, and almost everyone suffers at least some degree of anxiety about the lack of certainty this implies.” Do you ever find yourself guilty of having this anxiety?

I don’t think anxiety is something anyone should have reason to feel guilty about.  I agree with Kierkegaard that anxiety is a great teacher and that if one listens to it, it can lead toward greater intellectual and spiritual openness.  Anxiety comes as an indication that one may be resisting new possibilities of interpretation that might be more adequate to experience.  If one attends to the voice of anxiety, it can make one aware of areas of resistance.  Anxiety becomes chronic, and therefore problematic, however, when one resists it by trying to cling to impossible claims to certainty that would exclude further questions and further possibilities of experience and interpretation.

Do you think that it is likely in our lifetime that “the world’s religions might manage to develop a way of living together with mutual appreciation and respect”?

Certainly not in our lifetime, but even so, each individual can try, by living in intellectual and spiritual openness as a reasonable, responsible person, to contribute to the development of a world in which such mutual appreciation and respect can take root.

What can you tell us about your next book?

In Chapter 7, on “The Dynamic Diversity of Religious Worldview,” I said that the vitality of a religion depends on its openness to differences of interpretation and that just as there is diversity among different religions, there is also diversity within any given stream of religion.  In this book I used the diverse forms among Islamic traditions as the main example, but I also mentioned that there was similar diversity within the Christian tradition and that the differences between Eastern and Western Christianity would be worth exploring.  That is what my next book, In Search of the Triune God: The Christian Paths of East and West (University of Missouri Press) will be about.

Author Spotlight: Thekla Ellen Joiner

Sin in the City: Chicago and Revivalism, 1880-1920 by Thekla Ellen Joiner

Long before today’s culture wars, the “Third Great Awakening” rocked America. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday roused citizens to renounce sin as it manifested in popular culture, moral ambiguity, and the changing role of women.

Sin in the City examines three urban revivals in turn-of-the-century Chicago to show how revivalists negotiated that era’s perceived racial, sexual, and class threats. While most studies of this movement have focused on its male leaders and their interactions with society, Thekla Ellen Joiner raises new questions about gender and race by exploring Third Awakening revivalism as the ritualized performance of an evangelical social system. Rather than approaching these events merely as the achievements of persuasive men, she views them as choreographed collective rituals reinforcing a moral order defined by ideals of femininity, masculinity, and racial purity.

Q: Why did you choose Chicago as the focus for your examination of revivalism?

Turn-of-the-century Chicago was very dynamic in a way that highlights a complex array of competitive forces.  When I began my work on revivalism, I saw Chicago as an urban prototype that would allow me to study the collision of industrialism, immigration, urban problems, and reform--and, in particular, the role of evangelicals in this mix. Placing revivalists along with other Chicago evangelicals in this urban context was an important part of the study, and Chicago had a number of important evangelical leaders.  Protestant elites like Nettie and Cyrus McCormick, T. W. Harvey, and J. V. Farwell lived and worked in Chicago, which was also home to several influential churches as well as the Moody Bible Institute. These individuals and institutions supported individual revivalists like D. L. Moody and provided the finances and expertise that were influential in this revival era. 

As an urban prototype, Chicago also had ample amounts of urban “sin,” which of course was the threat that Third Awakening revivals sought to buffer and defeat. The city’s large immigrant working class was in the forefront of the labor movement, and some of the most important labor actions of the late nineteenth century, like the Haymarket riot and the Pullman strike, took place in the city. Saloons, prostitution, and early entertainment and amusement venues predominated throughout the city. All of these challenged the private and domestic moral order of evangelicals and became the focus of their mission and outreach.  

Because of its turn-of-the century civic and business “boosterism,” Chicago has very good historical documentation.  At the turn of the century, Chicago had at least five newspapers that promoted the city’s moral uplift and provided extensive coverage of Third Awakening revivals, including specific locations, descriptions of the events, and the widespread outreach of female leaders. 

Use of these sources allowed me to deepen our understanding of the urban and social context of revivalism. Past studies of the Third Awakening tended to focus on the male leadership or the revival events themselves. I wanted to try to understand what revivals meant within a specific urban context. Revival purposes and their alliance with other Protestant reform movements come into clearer perspective. For example, the understanding of the 1893 World’s Fair revival is deepened in light of the Fair Board’s battle with the Sabbatarians (a movement seeking to maintain the sanctity of the Lord’s Day and guarantee that only religious activities occurred on that day) over whether or not the Fair should remain open on Sunday; Virginia Asher’s message of moral womanhood becomes more meaningful in the context of the efforts of the Social Purity movement to outlaw prostitution in the city. Overall, Chicago offered an ideal urban space as it confronted a wide array of challenges precisely as it was entering the modern era.  

Q: You mention that the contributions of women in the Third Awakening have been largely overlooked. How has this caused us to misunderstand the movement’s dynamic?

Sin in the City works on two levels in terms of the dynamic of the Third Awakening.  First, on what I see as a fairly simple level, the book identifies the active role that women played in the Third Awakening. Women’s activism offers a “boots on the ground” way of looking at revival. Past perspectives have had men as the main attraction. Looking at women encourages a broader focus that I think is a more authentic means of understanding this phenomenon.

Women’s efforts were often outside the main event, entailing street evangelism as well as widespread work in factories, saloons, and brothels. During the 1910 Chapman-Alexander Simultaneous Campaign, for example, Virginia Asher organized large-scale meetings for working women by actually going to the factory floor in places like the “chipped beef” room of Armour Meatpacking and the Kirk Soap Company to deliver her message.  In the same revival, Asher received wide publicity for her nighttime visit to the Everleigh House, which was probably the most famous (or infamous) brothel west of the Appalachians. 

Female revival leaders like Virginia Asher and Grace Saxe have barely been mentioned in past studies of this era; yet these women and others were professional revivalists who evidence the very skills that have been so highly touted in male. They were charismatic speakers, singers, organizers, and communicators who significantly contributed to the outreach and impact of these revivals.    

On another level, going beyond the representative female and male revivalists, gender provided a central point of moral definition for this movement. I argue in the book that Third Awakening revivalism is defined by its defense of white middle-class gender roles and that this gendered understanding is central to the dynamic of this period.  Revivalism’s alliance with organizations like the WCTU and the Social Purity movement along with endless revival references and rituals that elevated moral womanhood and middle-class domesticity spiritualized an underlying gender theology that has been written off by earlier historians as nostalgic or anecdotal. 

A central point in Sin in the City is that gender is an important element of the Third Awakening because it informs the evangelical understanding of “sin” and that, over the course of the era, this gendered perception shifts in significant ways. At the end of the nineteenth century, and in earlier revivals, women were seen as the moralizers of society and men were portrayed as the “bad seed.”  By World War I, however, women’s growing independence in both the private and public spheres increasingly positioned them as threats to this same moral order. Without this gendered perspective, the history of the Third Awakening is limited to a male-oriented and “top-down” understanding of these socio-religious events.

Q: How did the ways in which women established their identities and position in the Third Awakening influence the gender dynamics of the new middle class?

Public activism by female revivalists within the Third Awakening represented evangelicalism’s moralizing feminine ideal. They spent their careers as middle-class models of womanhood and repeatedly orchestrated rituals that promoted this identity in the city’s most sinful places--the Midway at the Chicago World’s Fair, the famous Everleigh House brothel, on the factory floor.  I find it very interesting that these women lived very public career-oriented lives, yet their message espoused a gospel of domesticity, and they saw no contradiction between their lifestyle and their message.  

Q: What relationship does the Third Awakening have to religious movements today?

The most obvious connection is the willingness today of religious conservatives and groups to engage in social and political activism in order to defend what they perceive to be a moral cause. Defense-of-marriage and anti-abortion activism would be the best examples of this involvement.  This is not unlike the Third Awakening’s intervention into Chicago politics and its willingness to engage with controversial social issues like saloon closings and the outlawing of prostitution.

In the twenty-first century the evangelical subculture has become increasingly diverse and cannot be labeled with just one perspective. The idea that all evangelicals speak with a united voice now is difficult to support.

Q: You mention that revivalists’ promotion of their moral regime served to defend their position as the normative center of American culture. Do you think that Evangelical values continue to function as the standard for the definition of morality in America?

Conservative evangelicals continue to strive to hold the normative center for American morality, and for many evangelicals the struggle to maintain a moral regime continues. At the same time, the pervasive overselling of the evangelical ideology along with its alliance with a strong socio-economic conservatism has strengthened its alliance with the Republican Party which, in light of the 2008 and 2012 elections, appears to be losing ground. 

Q: Can you tell us about any upcoming projects or books you have in the works?

For the past three years I have been working with John T. Caldwell on a documentary film titled "Highway 58: Boron to Buttonwillow." We have used a120-mile stretch of blacktop through Kern County, California, as a "lens" to understand America's current racial, economic, and cultural politics. The film begins with a nasty labor fight in Boron in 2010, when transnational giant Rio Tinto tried to break the miners' union. Moving west along Highway 58, we filmed oral histories of survivors of the migrant farm camps featured in Grapes of Wrath as well the indigenous Oaxacans who have replaced the Oakies.  We conclude with a look at the South Central Farmers, who have been displaced from South Central Los Angeles to Buttonwillow.  The film maps the complex cultural ways that the images, films, and narratives of this area have been fabricated by “outsiders” and selectively reclaimed by “locals” and residents to self-identify and weather severe hardships in the region.  The final version will be completed in 2014.