Millersburg man preserves Missouri fiddling music and stories
The fiddler can’t keep the smile off his face. While performing a program at the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City, Howard Marshall was taking questions from the audience when Luke Stegner of Eugene stood up with his fiddle. Howard immediately invited young Luke — more than six decades his junior — up front and the group started an impromptu performance of “Ashokan Farewell.”
“That was a great illustration of the magic of folk music,” Howard says. “With a melody that everyone knows, musicians — some of whom have never met before — somehow without hesitation started playing a tune and it works.”
It reminded the retired University of Missouri professor of the 1970s in Columbia. Fiddling had suddenly become important at that time and college students began taking up the art in droves. “It was a great boost to the older fiddlers around town who few had really heard of,” Howard says. “They started going down to the Chez Coffeehouse and mixing in with the college kids. It was a marvelous thing to see and stories like that are what helped grow fiddling in popularity.”
If anyone would know about fiddling, it would be Howard. He is one of the foremost authorities on fiddling in Missouri and just published “Keeping It Old-Time: Fiddle Music in Missouri from the 1960s Folk Music Revival to the Present.” Combined with his first two fiddling books — “Fiddler’s Dream” and “Play Me Something Quick and Devilish” — Howard devotes more than 1,300 pages to the history, stories, tunes and traditions that have driven fiddling in the Show-Me State.
Fiddling is in Howard’s blood. There’s been a fiddler in his family for at least five generations and his grandfather was the chief fiddler when he grew up in Moberly. “In my teenage years, I got interested in other things,” he says. “But I always had fiddling in the back of my head.”
After serving in the Marine Corps, Howard returned to mid-Missouri and went to Mizzou. “I got back to Columbia in 1968 as the folk music revival and bluegrass music were blossoming and the music scene expanded in the 1970s when there seemed to be young fiddlers everywhere,” Howard says. “I had this memory of my grandfather playing old fiddle tunes and thinking I could never do that, but I just discovered it and it became my passion.”
Howard says the fiddle became the Everyman instrument due to its portable nature and its infectious tone. “Fiddle music is music that is meant to be danced to,” says Howard, a member of Callaway Electric Cooperative. “And people want to dance; they like to dance. You know, push all the furniture to the corner of the room and dance for two or three hours before you go home.”
That rhythm and flow between the fiddlers, his or her fellow musicians and dancers is what makes the jam sessions he’s so fond of memorable. “The fiddler uses his or her imagination, memory and ears to play their tunes,” he says. “A fiddler may never play the same tune exactly the same way twice.”
Howard describes his 20-year-old self as an “amateur archivist” when his fiddling passion began. He couldn’t find much information on fiddling, so he started scribbling notes on 3-by-5-inch index cards he kept in his pocket whenever he’d hear new fiddling stories or meet musicians.
That interest in preserving history led him to graduate school at Indiana University and eventually a job at the Library of Congress before returning to Mizzou. “It’s given me this professional interest in figuring out how to conserve and carry on traditions that could otherwise be lost,” he says. “If a tune is played and not recorded it may be forgotten. I’ve been recording with reel-to-reel tape to cassettes and now digital media.”
Howard’s in-depth trilogy chronicling Missouri’s fiddling history started in 2012 with his first book. That one began with the French fiddlers in Ste. Genevieve in the 1700s and moves forward to later generations. His next book in 2017 picks up in the 1920s and goes until the 1960s. His final book takes readers on fiddling’s history during the time he began playing in the 1960s to present time. Howard says that time period made “Keep It Old-Time” a bit more personal for him to research and write.
“However, I know many of the fiddlers who appear in the first two volumes as well as those in the new book,” he says. “And I knew personally about and was involved in many of the historical themes in all three.”
“Keep It Old-Time” chronicles fiddling’s rise in the ’60s and ’70s and the user-friendly Suzuki method that became popular in the ’80s allowing kids to learn without needing lengthy, formal violin lessons. “They just started playing fiddle tunes and by the ’90s, music teachers just decided they needed to let those students play a fiddle tune or two,” he says. “It’s grown today that the folks in the fiddling contests are so different than in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Their skill level is quite high.”
Howard has performed shows around the state for each of his three fiddling books, including more this year. He keeps music as local as possible so he invites local fiddlers and accompanists to join him as he mixes fiddling history with his stories and tunes as well as audience questions.
This back-and-forth helps cement the fiddling legacy Howard has built over decades.
“I think it’s important to know where things come from and why we love them,” he says. “That’s how we know how to carry it on.”
For more information or to buy any of Howard’s books, call 800-621-2736 or visit upress.missouri.edu. Contact Howard at howard.marshall1944@gmail.com. See future performance dates in photo caption above.