Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<div><div>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 lives near Fulton, MO.<br><br> Full bio: <b>Howard Wight Marshall </b>is Professor Emeritus and former chairman of Art History and Archaeology, and former director of the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Missouri in Columbia.<br><br> After dropping out of college to join the Marine Corps in the early 1960s, Marshall took his BA in English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and then took his MA and PhD in Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University. He wrote his dissertation based on extensive field recording of traditional farm buildings in Missouri&#8217;s Little Dixie folk region.<br><br> Then after graduate school, Dr. Marshall worked briefly as director of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and then for several years as a curator and planner at a living history museum in Indiana, and consulted for the Smithsonian Institution. He then was called to a position at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. While in Washington, he taught a night course in architectural history at George Washington University.<br><br> Marshall left the Library of Congress after five years in 1981 to teach at Kansas State University. In 1982, he returned to Columbia to establish the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center in the Graduate School at the University of Missouri, and to teach material culture, vernacular architecture, and historic preservation in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. After the closing of the Cultural Heritage Center in 1993 (due to a campus budget crisis), Marshall served as professor and department chair in Art History and Archaeology, and took early retirement in 2000.<br><br> Dr. Marshall&#8217;s books include <i>Buckaroos in Paradise: Cowboy Life in Paradise Valley, Nevada</i>,<i> Folk Architecture in Little Dixie: A Regional Culture in Missouri</i>, <i>Missouri Artist Jesse Howard</i>, <i>The German-American Experience in Missouri</i>, <i>Barns of Missouri: Storehouses of History</i>, and <i>Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri</i>. Dr. Marshall&#8217;s latest book is <i>Fiddler&#8217;s Dream: Old-Time, Swing, and Bluegrass Fiddling in Twentieth-Century Missouri</i>, which continues the ethnography and discussion in <i>Play Me Something Quick and Devilish</i>.<br><br> Marshall plays the music he studies and writes about. He credits the memory of his grandfather, Wiley Marshall, a country schoolmaster and fiddler in Randolph County, with inspiring him to want to play the old dance tunes on the violin. Later, Marshall learned tunes and techniques from central Missouri fiddle legends such as Taylor McBaine, Jake Hockemeyer, Johnny Bruce, Nile Wilson, and Pete McMahan.<br><br> Dr. Marshall confesses that the best thing about his career was the good luck to meet his spouse, the charming and irrepressible Margot McMillen. Howard and Margot live in northern Callaway County, where they operate a small livestock farm.</div></div>

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Play Me Something Quick and Devilish

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

Contents

Preface..................................................................................xiAcknowledgments..........................................................................xvAbbreviations............................................................................xviiIntroduction Notes on Old-Time Fiddling and People's History............................11. Fiddle Music in the Old French District...............................................252. Going West............................................................................533. The Old-Stock Americans...............................................................794. African American Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri........................................1075. The Legacy of German-Speaking Missourians.............................................1356. Music and Memory in the Civil War Era.................................................1637. The Irish and the Railroads in Post–Civil War Rural Missouri.....................1918. Indian Old-Time Fiddlers..............................................................2199. Musical Literacy in Victorian Times...................................................25110. Traditional Fiddling and the Dawn of Jazz............................................277Conclusion...............................................................................305Interviews...............................................................................309List of Transcriptions...................................................................313Notes....................................................................................315Selected Bibliography....................................................................349Discography..............................................................................363Index to Text............................................................................371Index to Voyager Records Companion CD....................................................393

Chapter One

The old French mansions ... still retained the easy, indolent air of the original colonists; and now and then the scraping of a fiddle, a strain of an ancient French song, or the sound of billiard balls, showed that the happy Gallic turn for gayety and amusement still lingered about the place.

—Washington Irving, Astoria (1836), recalling being in St. Louis in 1808

we often think of the Boones, Austins, and Smiths as the first European Missourians. But families named Lalumondier, Chouteau, and Vallé were here earlier. Missouri's part of the Midwest was a colony alternately of France and Spain long before 1803, when Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase added the immense territory to the United States.

French explorers, voyageurs, fur trappers, traders, and Catholic clerics came downriver from Canada and north from Louisiana in the late 1600s. The political and social center of the broader region of French control, "the Illinois Country," was in southern Illinois. The French imprint in present-day Missouri began in 1700s river villages such as Ste. Genevieve (ca. 1750) and lead-mining hamlets in the northeastern Ozark hills. Trade ports such as Cape Girardeau, St. Louis, Carondelet, Florissant, and St. Charles soon followed. The settlements and mining areas on the west bank of the Mississippi became known as "the Old French District" and "the Ste. Genevieve district." In other parts of present-day Missouri, the French established no significant towns, but today's map indicates many creeks and rivers with French names, including Perche, Chouteau, Auxvasse, Chariton, Lamine, and Platte.

Missouri's first important European presence, the French were eclipsed by other groups as their vast territory changed hands, first with Spanish control (1760s to 1800), three more years of French ownership, and finally through the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. People of the Old French District before 1803 saw their Creole language nearly die out and traditions change, first through the influx of old-stock Americans and later by German immigration. As Ray Brassieur and others note, the French have continually worked to "maintain group identity," and certain Missouri French traditions, in evolved versions, do continue. Musical traditions have endured despite the breakup of villages in counties such as Washington, Jefferson, St. Francois, Madison, Wayne, Perry, and Iron. These Ozark villages with economies based on commerce, mining, and meager agriculture did not achieve the prosperity or importance of Mississippi River towns such as Ste. Genevieve and St. Louis. Mines and vast tracts of virgin land were owned by the French and Spanish business class, as well as American entrepreneurs such as Daniel Boone and Moses Austin, who took advantage in the later 1700s of generous land grants and business opportunities during the period of Spanish control.

Ste. Genevieve and its area today are important as a valuable cultural-geographic region of French cultural expression. Despite the decades of Spanish ownership in the 1700s, Spanish culture made only small incursions into the French cultural traditions. French personality remains in elements transplanted from medieval southwestern France. These include foodways, colonial-era field patterns, "Creole cottages" of vertical log construction, vestiges of medieval dialect, a New Year's Eve Guillonnée mumming procession, and hints of old elements in today's fiddling. Just as with all cultural traditions altered through time and settlement by other groups, these features of cultural heritage in the Old French District are in continual evolution, which, notwithstanding efforts in cultural preservation, includes near extinction and absorption into modern America. Many descendants of the old French settlers, however, still live in the communities and retain a devotion to their Missouri French cultural heritage.

Our understanding of traditional fiddle and dance in the early Missouri French is complicated because there is scarce documentation. This was an oral culture, and paper was in short supply. The picture is also confused because of today's popular Cajun music from Louisiana. Cajun fiddling, a musical genre that evolved in the twentieth century, has little connection to old-time fiddling among French Missourians, whose families and traditions are linked historically to Canada. At the same time, however, many old-time fiddlers in the Old French District (and elsewhere across the United States) enjoy playing tunes popularized since the 1930s such as "Cajun Fiddle" and "Diggy Diggy Lo" and the Cajun music–inspired Hank Williams song from 1952, "Jambalaya."

Furthermore, Missouri French tunes and styles began being absorbed into the old-stock American repertory, and then came the waltzes, schottisches, and polkas of the German-settlement phase. Some of this new music settled comfortably with the older inherited French folk music—which was connected to regions of eastern Canada and southwestern France that had much in common with British Isles fiddle traditions (especially Celtic traditions).

Among references to fiddle music among the early Missouri French is a valuable article by Susan McCausland in the Missouri Historical Review from 1914 noting the importance on the...