Learning music is learning culture

Black fiddlers in New England and more

I recently played for a benefit concert and decided to give people a sense, using just a few words and a few tunes, of how much fiddle music teaches us about cultures around the world, and about our own culture as well.

One of the reasons this is true is because whenever people migrate somewhere, they bring their music with them. You can tell that many of the immigrants to Appalachia were originally from Scotland, even if they spent a generation or two in Northern Ireland first, because so many of their tunes are played almost the same way and in the same key as they are played in Scotland, and many of their songs include words about some place in Scotland, such as the Appalachian song mentioning George’s Square, which is in Glasgow, even if the American singers have long lost the connection to what or where George’s Square is.

When you find lots of Irish fiddle tunes in Quebec, you know that many Irish emigrated there or at least came into close contact with French Canadians in the logging camps of the Gaspé Peninsula. This becomes even more obvious when you notice a fiddle tune like “Miss McLeod” being played in G in Ireland and Quebec, while the same tune, as “Mrs MacLeod of Raasay,” or “Hop High Ladies,” is played in the key of A in Scotland and Appalachia.

The many Scottish tunes found in Métis culture provide as much as anything else that most of the men of the Hudson Bay Trading Company were recruited from Scotland (as it happened, many came from Orkney), and some of them married Inuit women to create the Métis culture in western Canada.

One of my community college students did a presentation on Mexican fiddling for part of her violin/fiddle finals, and revealed that although her father never permitted her family to learn anything about Mexico even though her mother had grown up in Mexico. She did her project about Mexican music anyway and discovered that the mariachi band she studied had been her mother’s favorite band growing up. She even learned that her godfather had been a mariachi fiddler.

This past semester, one of my students had planned to investigate jazz violin, but after I looked up his unusual name, which was a long last name with a “uu” in it, and realized his culture was Mongolian, I played a brief video for the class about Mongolian fiddling. This inspired him to change his presentation topic from jazz violin to the morin khuur, the Mongolian violin that is so important in their music, dance, and rituals. It turned out he knew a great deal about the culture and even had a friend who played that instrument.

Some students in my classes have reached out to other cultures for their research, such as the Iraqi student who shared with us her research on the erhu, a violin native to China, or the American who explained as much as he had time for about carnatic violin music, including a chart of the 72 raga scales (36 going up and 36 going down) played on the violin and other instruments in South India.

I’ve gained a lot from my students’ discoveries, but of course, I’ve also made many discoveries of my own, including stories I came across as I prepared for that benefit concert I mentioned at the beginning. What I decided to play for that event was a set of three tunes that represented three different cultural perspectives.

The first was a very old tune from the Shetland islands, so old that it was banned by the church, evidently because it was a pre-Christian community melody. This means it was certainly pre-Scottish, so at least over 600 years old, but if truly pre-Christian, it could have been more like 1500 years old.

The second tune was a modern tune that I’ve played for a long time, but recently, I noticed it in a new book of women’s compositions. My son informed me that the Northumbrian fiddler and piper Kathryn Tickell decided to compile the book when she saw statistics on how few tunes by women were being performed and recorded. She wanted to help make those tunes more easily available.

The third tune in my set was “Douglas’s Favorite,” which was published in an 1828 tunebook in Maine. The title apparently refers to a Jack Douglas, a very popular Black fiddler from the Belfast, Maine area in the early 1800s. When I read about this, it reminded me of a tune called “Belcher’s Reel,” written by Alvah Belcher, a Black fiddler who was very much in demand as a band leader and dance caller in upstate New York. Belcher’s obituary, in 1900, honored his popularity as a musician and as the owner of a grocery store in Kingston.

These two stories about Black fiddlers spotlighted a cultural fact that few are aware of — since the 1700s, and into the beginning of the 20th century, about half of American fiddlers and dance bands have historically been Black.

I recently found some clues as to why most people don’t know about this.

A hundred years ago this December, Henry Ford created the Ford Motor Company Music Department to promote certain kinds of American music and folk dancing — a very community-minded project, except for the skewed message that Ford spread along with it, not only to his workers, but to millions of families around the country. His message was that authentic American folk music is white, rural, and Anglo-Saxon in origin. The truth is far more complex and interesting than that, as I’ve just suggested about Jack Douglas and Alvah Belcher, neither of whom were white, rural, or Anglo-Saxon.

Ford was angry about influences that he considered damaging to what was, in his mind, was “authentic” American culture. Let’s just remind ourselves that Ford was unabashedly racist, antisemitic, and xenophobic. By the 1920s, 85% of the population of Detroit were first- or second-generation immigrants, and the most popular music at the time was jazz and Tin Pan Alley songs. You probably know that jazz has African-American roots, but not everyone recalls Tin Pan Alley, which was a large group of New York composers who wrote all the hit songs of the age, like “White Christmas,” “Over the Rainbow” and many more. Quite a few of the composers of Tin Pan Alley, such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Fats Waller, and Scott Joplin, were Jewish and Black.

The Ford Motor Company Music Department was Ford’s answer to the musical trends of his day. He even paid his White workers $5 a week extra to learn “proper” music and comportment through square dancing, and turned his campaign into a national effort. There were other influential musical leaders at that time, such as the Englishman Cecil Sharp, who helped spread a similar message. Sharp’s aim was to prove that Appalachian music was white and English in origin. He collected a lot of music in that area, but did it selectively, refusing to listen to any singers who didn’t match his preferred description.

The music and dance Ford promoted was good stuff, but his questionable and forceful message had a terrible impact. For example, the new recording industry decided that there was no market for Black fiddlers, so they hardly recorded any of them, and we are left today with very little evidence of their outsized contribution. Very few Black bands were recorded as well, though some were considered so good that the record labels changed the band names so they could sell their music as white music. For example, the Tennessee Chocolate Drops was renamed “The Tennessee Trio” for marketing to white people.

As a result of these 20th-century trends, few Black people today feel a connection anymore to traditional American folk musical instruments, dances, camps, etc. The myth about American folk music being rural and white seems to have carried on for a long time, even to today. In the 1970s, a number of college students got excited about the folk music revival; some went out into the “field” to learn from, in many cases, those white, rural master musicians, writing books that perpetuate the myth for new generations.

Ford’s contributions to industry and automobile manufacturing were huge, just as Cecil Sharp’s work was invaluable for those who enjoyed English dance and music. But the narrative around American folk music and dance has often been missing key elements. A century ago, these biased and powerful people managed to filter our culture through a strange prism of their own making, leaving out a lot of the natural color. Henry Ford may have been a great businessman, but it was not because of his industrial prowess that his portrait was hung in Hitler’s Munich office.

Music has been integral to human society since the dawn of time. Musical archaeologists (yes, that’s a thing now!) have discovered growing evidence about ancient musical instruments and the acoustics of neolithic gathering places. Music, especially from communities around the world, is a great conduit into unexpected cultural histories. Whether through listening, teaching, or playing the music and telling its stories, there’s always more to learn, and not just about the instrument or the notes!

Here’s a recording I made today of “Douglas’s Favorite” which appears to have either been written by or made famous by Jack Douglas: