North American Fiddle Music: A Research and Information GuideDrewBeisswenger. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

North American Fiddle Music: A Research and Information Guide Drew Beisswenger. New York: Routledge, 2011. This welcome new research guide fills a notable gap in reference works dealing with traditional fiddle music in the United States and Canada while also providing an interpretative scheme of its own, albeit a lightly held one. Fiddle music has historically occupied an underappreciated (if not outright neglected) corner of musicological research. Yet the music has yielded a massive body of scholarship that until now has remained largely uncategorized, disconnected across time and space, and divided by origin, region, and style. Drew Beisswenger's intent is to provide the first collection of resources expressly dedicated to vernacular fiddle music in North America, including annotated commentaries on the coverage and intent of the various materials. The subtitle signals this book is a guide, but it is at heart an annotated bibliography with a few short contextual introductory essays intended to aid researchers. This volume is meant both to establish the broad outlines of scholarly inquiry into fiddling as well as to organize, for the first time, sources of information that have hitherto resided in un-indexed journals, local periodicals, or other difficult to access sources or be strewn across and between different scholarly fields. This volume will be of greatest utility to musicologists, ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and music historians, rather than musicians looking for information on specific tunes. Beisswenger emphasizes printed and electronic sources which provide historical background and socio-cultural context of fiddle music. The primary focus is on and context rather than tunes or histories of specific tunes. He starts with a strong list of other relevant bibliographies. And does offer an essential list of tune collections from the many foundational works to the numerous more obscure ones that are useful to have identified. Beisswenger, himself the author of a vital collection of Ozark tunes as well as a study of West Virginia fiddler Melvin Wine, emphasizes materials that provide coverage of traditional bearers in a variety of areas while giving less emphasis to commercial fiddling or professional players, or to sources of primary material that are germane to studies of fiddling. In a few places in this book, Beisswenger recommends supplementing his text and other bibliographies with visits to local fiddlers (xix), which signals his essential methodological approach to research and taxonomy of fiddling through fieldwork. Such an approach has, of course, had great impact on the shape of the field and on understandings of fiddle music, as innumerable works covered in this volume make clear. One important area of information the book engages but does not fully cover is that of liner notes. Though not many liner notes are covered in this book, the annotations for those that are included list the names of all of the on the recordings. This is useful for the purposes of finding a recording of these listed musicians, but of somewhat limited (if not random) overall utility since only a small number of recordings are included. The book understandably sidesteps being a discography because of the basic overwhelming task involved in listing recordings in the numerous genres it covers. There thus remains a need for this kind of exhaustive discography of specifically fiddle music across the numerous genres in North America on the scale of Guthrie T. Meade, Jr., and Doug Meade's magisterial Country Music Sources: A Biblio-Discograpky of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music (which itself covers a large swath of American fiddling). The default approach in the volume is to utilize single dominant categories to incorporate topics that are at times oriented toward diffusion. Seeing such new juxtapositions of citations in this book, Beisswenger argues, might help researchers establish more meaningful culture, geographic, and stylistic boundaries of fiddle traditions (xvii). …