Bob Bovee and Gail Heil Narrators

Phil Nusbaum Interviewer

June 15, 2010

PN: Phil Nusbaum GH: Gail Heil BB: Bob Bovee

PN: This is June 15th, 2010. Bob Bovee and Gail Heil are here at their beautiful place in Spring Grove [Minnesota]. How did you get interested in all this [music] initially?

GH: I actually fell into this form of music it was really because I went to take some guitar lessons and the person who was teaching me guitar played Old Time fiddle and taught me to play back-up. And so, this was in St. Louis, Missouri and I fell into this big, very, very fine community of Old Time musicians, and just was swept away.

BB: …and almost immediately ended up in a band.

GH: That’s true, literally, it was serendipitous. It was called the Mound City String Band, the original Mound City String Band.

PN: You must have found it a compelling, great experience.

GH: It was! Another thing that I should say is that this guitar teacher I had told me to go check out some LPs, and I checked out an RCA, vintage LP, which was early, rural string bands, and I was never the same after that. It was the roughest, rawest stuff you ever heard and it was so beautiful to my ears. It had Henry Ford’s Orchestra on it, and the Shelor’s singing “The Big Bend Gal”, and somebody sang, “Bring me a leaf from the sea, sea, sea…” by the Carolina Tar Heels. It was enchanting. And Eck Robertson’s “Ragtime Annie”.

BB: And that was what you had to learn when the fiddle came into your life.

GH: That was the first fiddle tune I learned.

PN: What about you, Bob?

BB: I actually grew up with the music. My grandmother played mandolin, harmonica and sang Old Time songs, ballads, and things like that. My grandpa played some banjo, and my dad played harmonica, and my grandparents started takin’ me to fiddle contests when I was 14 or so. I was just listening, I wasn’t even playing then; for some reason I resisted playing an instrument. And then when I was in high school, I had been around all this music, there was the big Folk

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boom, and all my friends were listening to Folk music and so was I, and so I got a banjo - I heard a banjo player and I had to have a banjo. I bought this banjo that a woman had in her attic and started playing Folk music of various sorts. The more I listened, the more I discovered that I really liked the older styles - when I found the reissued recordings of the Carter Family, and the Blue Sky Boys, and then the recordings of the New Lost City Ramblers, that was my favorite stuff. I realized I was going right back to the things that my family had played and sung, and the music I’d heard at those fiddle contests.

PN: Where was that?

BB: In Nebraska.

PN: Nebraska has not been collected that much. Do you know of…?

BB: My specialty in the music are the early, commercial recordings - ‘20’s and ‘30’s, 78s, and nobody recorded any of those in Nebraska, it’s true. There were, though, fiddlers everywhere in this country. In Nebraska, particularly along the Missouri River Valley there, had some really spectacular fiddlers, including Uncle Bob Walters who taught all these other great fiddlers in the area, people like: Dwight Lamb, and Cyril Stinnett - there’s a whole regional style there. So, I grew up hearing a lot of those fiddlers. There have been some people that have collected in Nebraska…the only one who comes to mind is Roger Welsh, who collected especially the German music from western Nebraska - the dance bands with accordion and hammer dulcimer. The fiddle music was everywhere there.

PN: How old are you, Bob?

BB: I’m 64.

PN: And you, Gail?

GH: I’m 64.

PN: About what year did you start to play the guitar?

BB: I started to play the banjo in 1963, and then within two years I’d picked up the harmonica, guitar, and the autoharp.

PN: When did it start to seem to you that this might actually be a life’s work?

BB: For me it was just kind of a dream. As I was going to college [University of Nebraska] I played as much as I possibly could, and I played at little coffee houses or whatever kind of events there were. When I got out of college I moved to New York City for about a year and a half, and I played as much as I could in the coffee houses there, kind of learning the craft of performing, but I didn’t really think I would ever make a living at it. Then a lot of parts of my life fell apart and I went on the road, hitchhiking around the country and playing wherever I

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could, and discovered that I could make enough money to live on, and that that was more important that making a lot of money.

GH: Well, in my case, it was a little bit different, because I didn’t start playing until I was almost 30 years old. I don’t think I actually picked up the guitar the early to mid 70s. Then I actually became part of a band almost immediately. I worked some other jobs, but I pretty much have been able to make my living, such as it is, for most of these years just by teaching, and playing in groups.

PN: What was sustaining you before you picked up instruments?

GH: Well, I was raising children. I was working some small jobs, but mostly I was raising children.

PN: When did you meet?

BB: We met first in 1977 at the Frontier Folklife Festival in St. Louis under the arch. It was one of those National Park Service Folk festivals with strictly traditional music - fabulous music. I was hired as a performer and Gail was on staff there.

PN: I get the feeling that people of your age, it’s a little different than the kids today, there’s a big preservation mentality - maybe it comes from The New Lost City Ramblers, I don’t know. But I know that’s true of you; when you perform, you tell who you learned the tune from, who the original players are, maybe a little of your interpretation of it - like to document it. I don’t know that the original old timers - the generation that recorded in the ‘20s and ‘30s - would have done that. That’s something that, I think, separates your generation from the preceding.

BB: Probably not. Although, if you go back and check with some of the interviews done with some of the old timers, they’ll say, “Well, here’s a tune that I learned from such and such.” But for many of us when we came along, we didn’t run into as many of those old timers, so we learned from recordings. We believe in credit where credit is due, and this music has to be rooted somewhere, it just doesn’t float out there all by itself, and I think that kind of is an important way to tie it to our whole folklore and history. I’m a historian, that was what I studied in college and I’ve always been interested in, so these facts about where the music came from and who performed it and so on are of interest to me and I try to make it of interest to audiences.

GH: Don’t you think it maybe has something also to do with, like, just the era of the Folk boom? We were young adults right at that time, and I just think everybody was so reverent of the list of names of somebody like Mississippi John Hurt and people who are just icons. I know that for me, that’s one of the reasons I became very interested in it. I don’t know about the generation today, I think that they’ve come from a different place, not that there’s not reverence there for the old tunes, but they approach it from a different place altogether.

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BB: I don’t know how their revelation of the music came about - a lot of these younger people. Along with the things I was talking about, one of the things that really influenced me was when I came across Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. You’ll hear this again and again from Old Time musicians, especially from our age and older, that this was really the first reissue of the old recordings, it was so broad. When I heard it I thought some of this music must be from another planet, it was so bizarre, and yet so appealing.

PN: I think Smith was kind of a quirky character and had quirky taste, and who knows what his process was for selecting that. It wasn’t scientific, but it played a large role in defining the field.

BB: Absolutely.

PN: There’s one on there of a brass band playing and at the end you hear, “BE SEATED.” And what the heck is that? But then it also had Mississippi John Hurt. It also had Doc Box…

GH: Do you know the cut that he is talking about?

BB: I absolutely know the cut that you’re talking about. It was the Victoria Cafe Orchestra. It was the only recording on that collection that was recorded in Minnesota, at the Victoria Cafe in St. Paul. Right now there’s a huge movement to save the Victoria Cafe, which they’re trying to tear down and build a parking lot there. That recording is…there’s a lot of talk about it right now…people blogging about it online.

PN: Let’s talk about Minnesota. What caused you to go to Minnesota and live, and when was that?

GH: What caused me to go to Minnesota was the fact that Bob was from Minnesota, so we were deciding: St. Louis, Missouri; Minnesota…

PN: But he’s from Nebraska.

GH: But he’d lived here for probably almost 10 years when I met him.

PN: What year was that that you moved up?

BB: I moved to Minnesota in 1971. I came up to Minnesota - that was kind of my footloose days when I was searching for what to do with myself. I came to visit a friend of mine, Stevie Beck, and we started playing music together. We went to the New Riverside Cafe, which was kind of the music center in those days, and played the open stage just for the fun of it. We were immediately asked to come back and play a gig there. Well, I thought this must be a good omen, and then I went to a party and there were four fiddlers at the party, and I thought, “I’ve never been anywhere, except fiddle contest, where there are this many fiddlers, so this must be the place I should live.” [Laughter] I don’t think I’ve ever regretted moving to Minnesota.

GH: You were really casting around, weren’t you, back then?

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BB: I was, but I found the right place.

PN: What others have told me is that there was Folk music, Old Time music, Bluegrass music, but that there was no place to play, so people had parties.

BB: Yes they did. There were a very few venues. There was the New Riverside Cafe, and the Coffee House Extempore, and if you were really lucky, you might get a gig at the Whole Coffee House at the University of Minnesota. Other things were pretty scattered, but there were no Folk music, or Bluegrass, or Old Time festivals in the area.

GH: Are you talking about the early 70s, because the Festival was going on by the time I moved here in ‘79?

BB: Right, the Minnesota Festival started mid to late ‘70s. Before that, there were parties, lots of parties, and there were some other bar gigs that people played, and often the parties didn’t really begin until the bars closed. So, at 1:00 [a.m.] you’d show up at somebody’s house and there’d be music all night.

PN: In a way, this generation that you’re a part of were pioneers. Not pioneers like, “the first to record,” because the scene has changed so dramatically - urban people and college-educated people now play this, but the first of that generation to get a foothold in the business part of it.

BB: I think so, but the New Lost City Ramblers, of course, who kind of blazed the trail for all of us, but there were a lot of us who just kind of followed right on their footsteps and…

GH: …and at least helped keep the music alive, even if it was at parties, so that when the possibility came about for us to perform, there we were - ready, and ready to pass it on, too.

BB: There was a resurgence in the music when the New Lost City Ramblers started. There was another resurgence when Highwood String Band came along in the early ‘70s. Then the music kind of languished; we were always there, but not much happened until, I hate to say this, O Brother [movie: O Brother, Where Art Thou?], and then we had another big explosion in the music. I think the last 10 years there are more and more people all the time who interested in playing Old Time.

GH: Do you think that’s really what you would attribute it to, just out of curiosity?

BB: I think that was a big factor, I hate to admit it. [Laughter]

PN: Why do you hate it admit it?

GH: That Hollywood could have launched…

BB: That the media could have created this explosion in interest that we all had been trying to create for 30 years before.

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PN: It’s just funny, being on television gives you legitimacy. Today, you can’t have a business without a website. You can hardly be a person without a website.

BB: I remember the first time I called someone to book a gig and they asked me if I had a website. I said, “No.” They said that they hadn’t booked anybody in two years who didn’t have a website, and that was the end of the conversation.

GH: When did we have a website - about a month after that?

BB: Very shortly… [Laughter]

PN: Let’s go back to something you mentioned earlier, Bob, that the Bluegrass community and the Old Time community was the same community - tell me about that.

BB: Well, to my way of thinking, it was, and if you listen to those recordings from the ‘50s and ‘60s from places like Galax or Mount Airy, the lines between Bluegrass and Old Time are pretty hazy. You’ll have a band with a Bluegrass banjo player, but the fiddler is pretty strictly Old Time.

PN: The Scruggs style really took banjo players by storm; that’s what I think happened. Once you heard Earl [Scruggs], you had to do it that way, or many people thought that. There was less motivation for fiddle players to switch over, because Old Time fiddle is so rich.

BB: Right. And if you listen to some of the Old Time fiddlers in the areas where we came from like, one of the people that Gail knew in St. Louis - Frank Reed, the only album I know of that he recorded he has a Bluegrass-style banjo player playing with him, but his fiddling is strictly Old Time. I know that when I first got interested in this music in the 1960s, I was in college, and I had this group of friends. We’d get together once a week to play music, and we didn’t really draw the lines between Bluegrass and Old Time. We had a banjo player who could play either clawhammer or Scruggs style, and he would play what seemed appropriate to him on the song, or we’d play something that was generally a Bluegrass song and he’d play Bluegrass banjo or mandolin. Then we’d play some real Old Time thing and we’d all play it different, but there wasn’t a division. When I came to the Twin Cities, the same thing. Those parties we were talking about - you had the people that played Old Time, you would have the Bluegrass bands like the Middle Spunk Creek Boys would all be there and we’d be playing with them, you had people like the late Bill Hinkley [local legend who died a few months ago] who played in just about any genre and with everybody; so the divisions were much hazier than they are now.

PN: This is a question, was it that the divisions were hazy in this age group doing this? A parallel experience that I had when I was goin’ to college in New York City we would get together, and anybody who played some kind of Folk music would get together and we’d play something - some mishmash of jug band, and Blues, and Bluegrass, and whatever we wanted. Sometimes I think that what happens is if you continue playing past your early 20s, you hear the

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call of an established genre, not this mishmash, but something else. So this is all just to ask, “Is this an age thing?” The perspective of your age and the people you were immediately surrounded with caused you to think that the boundaries were hazy, or was that the way it really is in the country?

GH: I don’t know, Phil, I think that’s a really good point that you bring up, but I really don’t know. I think when you say that maybe after you’ve played for a dozen years, you take off in one little more tunneled vision area and are more discriminating about the musicians who you surround yourself with. What do you think, Bob?

BB: That wasn’t the case with you. You almost immediately found Old Time music and focused directly on it.

GH: I did. Mine was really an epiphany, I have to say, I found it, that was all I wanted to do. That’s not what most people do.

BB: I was a little more eclectic in my tastes and what I would play and what I liked. But always the majority of it, the music I was grounded in was Old Time. I think the thing about the musical community playing all styles together, had something to do, too, with the fact that we were a much smaller community at that time, so we didn’t tend to divide ourselves off into different genres, because then you’d have only been hanging out with a handful of people or fewer.

PN: You have an act. You have a professional, show business act in Old Time music - the two of you together; when did that start?

GH: It really didn’t start until a few years after I had moved up to the Twin Cities, I think. Bob was still performing solo, traveling a bit, and I had small children. Somehow we didn’t think we were ever going to do this, did we?

BB: You had said you probably didn’t want to be performing together. I think there’s a fear of having your professional life and your home life too entwined. Some people think that that can be really difficult, but for us, we just naturally fell into it. We sat around in the kitchen and played music, and eventually we realized that we sounded good enough that maybe we could go out and perform together.

GH: Do you even remember the first thing we ever played publicly? I have no recollection whatsoever.

BB: I don’t remember what the first thing would have been, other than the Monday Night Square Dance, which we started right about the time Gail moved to the Twin Cities. As far as actually performing, it was some little cafe in the Twin Cities. That’s about all I can remember.

PN: How did you put together your act?

GH: I have no idea. [Laughing]

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BB: This is no act! [Laughter] If a song appealed to one of us, we would sit down and start playing it. If it worked, it became part of what we did. If it didn’t…there are songs that we’ve played for 30 years that we never perform because we’re not happy with what we’re doing with them, or we feel like they’re not going to fit into a show. I don’t think there was a plan.

GH: I don’t think there was ever a plan.

PN: But when you look back, and think of what kind of decisions did you tend to make that, over time, led to the kind of presentation that you give?

BB: One of the decisions we made was that the old music is what we both love the most and felt comfortable with. When we started out we did a few things that were sort of from another genre, maybe some Bluegrass song, maybe a few things from a contemporary songwriter like Norman Blake, who’s rooted in Old Time, but still they kind of slipped out of our repertoire because we just didn’t feel as tied to that music.

GH: That’s true, I’d almost forgotten that. I guess it was a conscious decision, back then, to just move strictly to the really old sounds, whether or not they would be more popular or less popular with audiences. You have to make that decision often, in Old Time music.

PN: Is this sort of an ideology with you? Is it strictly that it just turns out that the old sounds better? Personally I can think of some old music that every time I listen to it it’s like - not music that’s in my family, in my cultural heritage, ‘cause I adopted all of this myself - but when I hear the Carter Family sing “Worried Man Blues”, it just uh! [hitting himself in the heart] Or Clarence Ashley with the “Cuckoo Bird”, oh!, now there’s a…I saw this on YouTube™, him doing this, he was just in a parking lot or something, playing it for two people, it’s perfect! There’s no…and he’s confident as can be, and proud to represent the song, and sort of pass on - it’s not only passing on the song, it’s passing on the aesthetics for appreciating this.

BB: Well, and he’s an interesting case, too, because he was a real master performer. He wasn’t just a mountain man that was discovered when he was an old man, playing this music. He had recorded in the 1920s, and he’d worked the Medicine Show circuit for years and years, so he really knew how to put across a song.

GH: But ideology is what…I want to get back to your question.

PN: Is it the sound, or is it some ideology connected to it?

GH: It’s everything to me: it’s the way Bob and I live our lives; it’s having moved back to the country; and it’s a whole life being as far as I’m concerned.

BB: I think, originally for me, it was the sound and the feel of the music and the honesty. I also realize that’s it’s important to keep this music alive, and not just as museum pieces on the old recordings, but to make it your own and perpetuate it for as long as we can.

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PN: Talk a little bit more about the ideology, if you can put words on it - living in the country, full time devotion to the music, and preserving, and all of this.

BB: I’m gonna interject my favorite new quote from a book I’ve been reading. This is by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, “Making money isn’t hard in itself, what’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.”

PN: Right on.

BB: I think that’s something we realized some years ago.

GH: I think actually, for me, if I had to answer your question about ideology, and I’m not sure how well I can do that. For me, first and foremost, it is loving the music so dearly, second of all it’s loving so dearly doing it with the person I live with, and the moving back to the country just made our lives so much easier to do this in, for some reason. It was something that both of us had wanted to do since the first time we met, right, was to escape the big city ways and…

BB: The music and our lives fit together better than they did before. The music seems more natural to me here.

GH: I hope you’re gonna edit this a lot. This is just such a corny…I just feel really corny.

PN: No, I don’t see…to me something is corny when it’s prefabricated; to me, I don’t see how anyone could say it was corny. I don’t think it’s B.S.

GH: Oh, well, I appreciate you saying that.

BB: Well, it’s not, no.

GH: No.

BB: We moved out here into the country 22 years ago.

GH: Yep.

BB: And Gail does a big garden and helps provide a lot of our food. I’m more the hunter- gatherer sort myself…

GH: He’s not a hunter, per se, he forages.

BB: Mostly its nuts and berries I that I bring in from out there, whatever else [Laughter] that’s a part of our life, too.

GH: We have a small orchard. Life is good.

PN: The way you live and play and work - is it sort of a movement? Do other Old Time musicians do this?

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GH: I think there are many Old Time musicians who are living like we are.

BB: I think there are a lot. Twenty years ago I don’t think there were very many people doing Old Time music full time. In fact, Mike Seeger said in the Old Time Herald that the only people he knew making a living doing Old Time music, besides himself, was us.

GH: That’s such a crazy thing to say. That wasn’t true at all.

BB: I don’t know, but it’s true that some of the people we think of as being sort of the most accepted…who can get the most work have maintained their day jobs, rather than relying solely on the music. And it’s true that there are not a lot of people out there, and we know because we bring a lot of musicians for our festival every spring now, and so many of them have a real job… a real job. [Laughing]

GH: Well, and I guess that you and I are just kind of lazy in that way; we have chosen to live on a lot less money than many people, just for the sake of making our own choices and living exactly the way we want to.

BB: Right. Have more control over our own lives.

PN: Do you think there’s a difference between the Old Time community and the Bluegrass community regarding lifestyle choices?

GH: I really don’t know.

BB: I guess I would find that hard to speak on.

GH: What do you think, Phil?

PN: My impression is that finding acreage to live on is more of an Old Time music thing than a Bluegrass music thing, but there are so many lifestyles now that are connected with each type. There are good Old Time musicians and good Bluegrass musicians that work in industry, that have some sort of high-profile job. Then there are ones who do what you do, are experts in… you guys are walking discographies, you know the old music. You’ve done a lot of talking to people, and this is what makes you professional Old Time musicians - being totally immersed in that. So, I don’t know.

You run something called Bluff Country Gathering.

BB: We do, and that’s something Gail should talk about because it was her brainchild.

PN: How did Bluff Country Gathering evolve? Which, I’ll explain, is a yearly weekend retreat where there are workshops and classes, and playing Old Time instruments and Old Time music. Then there are concerts by the faculty, who are some really good people.

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GH: It started because Bob and I had been hired to go out to perform for a weeklong festival very similar to this in Port Townsend, Washington - it’s out on the Olympic Peninsula, the name of the festival is The Festival of American Fiddle Tunes. Bob and I actually had been hired to bring Vesta Johnson, a fiddle player from Missouri who I learned a lot from who’s in her mid 80s now, to bring her out to present her and facilitate her being there as a teacher. We were pretty entranced with the way this whole week went, and when we got home I said to Bob that I would really like to run something really similar to Fiddle Tunes, and…

PN: This is about which year?

GH: Was this our 12th year?

BB: The first year was 1999. There were camps like this around the country, particularly on the east coast and the west coast, but out here in the middle, we really weren’t aware of any going on of the sort we envisioned, so we decided we’d take up the slack here.

GH: So, it is similar in many ways to, as Bob was mentioning, all of these other camps: Swannanoa Gathering in North Carolina, Augusta in Elkins, West Virginia, and so forth. We run ours a little looser, it’s a little anarchistically run the way our students take lessons - they can just mix and match any old time and any old performer they wish, and that’s the way Fiddle Tunes was run…that’s what we liked.

BB: One of the reasons we started it was we wanted a chance to see our favorite Old Time musicians, and we figured the way we could do that was to bring them here to perform and teach, and get a bunch of students to come pay so that we could afford to have them. Somehow that all worked.

GH: We started modestly with just a day-long festival. We took, what, two days?

BB: It was just the same length. We started on Thursday afternoon and run until Sunday noon, but the first year there were only four instructors.

GH: Right. And so now it’s just sort of ballooned into a festival that takes 100 students, we’re limited to 100 students because of the size of our facilities. We wish we could be bigger sometimes, but our students seem to want to keep it small so it is very intimate. We do have two public events that really have become well attended over the years.

PN: What’s the philosophy behind wanting to do this, since it is a lot of work and pays little?

GH: It’s a labor of love, Phil, and it’s passing along traditions. That’s what it’s all about.

BB: And right now, at this time of year, since it was over a few weeks ago, we’re not doing much about it, but really it is a year-long thing: planning and talking to performers; booking performers; doing all the preparation for it - we’re always kind of working on this - then the last 4 or 5 months before, it’s fairly hectic all that time dealing with it.

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PN: Is this weekend learning immersion in culture a new thing? In the 1920s did they have these things?

GH: They had the Hindman schools - how would you compare those, Bob? You know more about those than I do.

BB: I don’t really think that’s comparable. I don’t know, but I don’t see anything like this before the 1970s, really, is when all these camps that we’re aware of started. I guess I’m not really sure. The closest thing I can think of years ago would have been fiddlers’ conventions, which were often contests, too, but they were a chance for fiddlers to get together and trade tunes and learn from each other.

GH: I guess I don’t really know, except that I do know that since we started our camp, 12 years ago, I could think of a dozen camps, probably two dozen that have sprung up all over the country. It’s just wildly popular now.

PN: Where I was going with this is that the tradition is a little more codified than it was in the 1920s, so now you can have a clawhammer workshop, or you could have somebody teaching you shuffle bowing...

GH: …and we do…

PN: And that’s not a criticism, it’s just trying to notice social change.

GH: There are so many Old Time fiddle traditions alone, in this country, that…and years ago people played the style that their region was playing, and now, there are so many, that if you want to learn them you might as well bring on the experts who can really teach you that.

BB: And most of these beginning players, novice players, and intermediate players may not know any masters to go to, to learn from, as people used to do - you’d sit at the foot of a master fiddler and watch what they do. Our friend, Dwight Lamb from down in Iowa, when he decided that he wanted to learn to play the fiddle - he was a teenager, and his inspiration was Bob Walters. Well, Bob Walters lived over across the Missouri River in Nebraska, maybe 50 miles away from Dwight. Dwight would hitchhike over there and spend his time learning tunes from Bob Walters, and hitchhike back home, and that was the way people learned. You picked out who you wanted to learn from, or maybe lots of people you wanted to learn from if you could find them in your area. But now, most players don’t have that chance, so we give them that chance.

PN: Do you think it’s legitimate to be learning music that’s not from your area?

GH: [Laughing] Sure, why not? Yeah, I guess you’re asking us because we’re so firm in our feelings about Old Time music, maybe you’d think that we would feel that way, but…

PN: I don’t know how you’d feel about that.

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GH: No, I think it’s pretty cool, and I think it’s wonderful if you can bring masters in who really express it, and not just somebody who’s just learned it. Those masters - there are fewer and fewer of the really Old Time masters left anymore.

PN: You mean the Old Time masters who learned in a particular cultural tradition?

GH: Yeah.

PN: I’d like to get your opinion on this, it does seem to be true today that even people from a particular cultural tradition, for them to pick up that fiddle style, for example, that’s a choice, not a given.

GH: Sure.

BB: Absolutely. Right here where we live, Spring Grove, Spring Grove is a Norwegian town, it’s still very Norwegian.

PN: I saw a business, driving in, that was flying the Norwegian flag.

BB: Absolutely. Well, there were a lot of fiddlers in this town and in the country right around it. We understand that back in the ‘50s and ‘60s there was a little cafe in town where the musicians would come in on Saturday morning at 8 o’clock and start playing music, and play until closing time that night. Instruments hung on the wall, so they didn’t even have to bring ‘em with ‘em if they didn’t want to. They were everywhere. And yet, very few people who grew up in this area, of the younger generation, have chosen to learn that music. And so there’s almost no one around here playing the music from the Norwegian-American, or just this region - there were fiddlers who were not necessarily Norwegian, too. There are almost no young fiddlers who learned from them.

PN: I knew a few of them: Bill Sherburne, Henry Storhof, who was a very good fiddle player.

BB: Was he the one from Sheldon?

PN: No, I know who you mean. Storhof was a psalmodikon [a single-stringed musical instrument developed in Scandinavia for simplifying music in churches and schools] player, but he also played the violin, and actually, Sherburne knew some of Storhof’s pieces, because he would say that this is the Henry Storhof waltz. The guy from Sheldon played the violin, and his wife played the piano, and they did mostly hymns and waltzes.

GH: They’re gone now. I can’t remember their names.

BB: Of course, Bill Sherburne was kind of the master of this area. When you talk to the other older musicians around here, he’s always the one that they bring up.

PN: When he played for a dance, it was very good.

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BB: Yes, we use to go to his dances. They would be packed, and it would be from little toddlers up to almost 90-year olds out there dancing, and he played for however long those dances went: three hours or more. There were no breaks - the band did not take breaks.

GH: There were also a couple of other really good dance fiddlers from around here. I’m thinking of Rudy Klinski from Caledonia, and Clarence Housker from Mabel. So those are just the two towns either side of Spring Grove. They’re all gone now, but they were alive and playing pretty well when Bob and I moved here 20 years ago.

PN: Sherburne learned from Gust Ellingson, but he also learned from his sister, I think.

GH: I don’t really know much about Bill’s background.

PN: Bill was kind of quiet. You know whose playing he loved? Joe Pancerzewski.

GH: Oh, Canadian?

PN: No, Pacific Northwest. I knew because when I was at his house, he had all of Joe’s LPs laying out and when I asked him, he told me why.

PN: What is your relationship to the Old Time music of southeast Minnesota, the Scandinavian dance music?

GH: Well, I love playing schottisches, in particular if we’re talking Scandinavian music. We don’t do a lot of it, but I would say we do one or two things a show, usually, that we talk about.

BB: Especially if we’re playing for some of the older folks in this area, we make sure to do them a schottische, a waltz that either is sort of out of their tradition or that sounds similar.

GH: Well, if we’re doing shows for that group of people, we’re also playing a lot more than a couple of things. I was talking about our regular shows. If we’re doing a seniors program we’ll do quite a few numbers; waltzes like the “Wee Dog Waltz”, which is also known as “Oh, Where, Oh, Where Has My Little Dog Gone?” You gotta play ‘em fast and with a good lilt, and they’ll love ‘em.

PN: Do you ever consider really making a study of the Old Time music from around here?

GH: Not really. I haven’t. Not so much. I collect stories from some of the old timers about what the music scene was like. I have to tell Phil this one if he hasn’t heard it: the next farm right up around a quarter mile from us was lived in by the Gran brothers, and they were musicians and they had dances in their granary. The granary still stands. In the winter months, when they weren’t able to have dances there, they would pick up their telephone at a certain hour every Sunday evening, and everybody from that farm, including us, and all the other string of farms that went into Spring Grove were all on a party line, and everybody would pick up their party lines and the Gran brothers would play for an hour, just one hour because the batteries would

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wear down too much on the party line if they played any longer than that. But that was really important to people, that they were going to get to hear their music once a week. I just love that story.

PN: What about your relationships with the neighbors around here? It struck me that when you lived in Minneapolis you probably saw your musician friends probably a lot, or a lot more than you see musician friends now. Now you’re like this couple that has a farmhouse, and some land, but everybody around you is doing something not connected to music...

BB: Mostly dairy farmers around here...

GH: Quite a few professionals, though, actually, people that work at Mayo Clinic, believe it or not, live just…

BB: I suppose, you could say, that we’re still fairly isolated. Not working in the community, our children are all grown up and on their own, so we don’t have children in the schools, so we’re not involved with that. We are not as tied in to this community as we still are to our musical community throughout the country, and we are fairly isolated here from most of our musical friends. There are not too many who live even within an hour’s drive of us.

GH: And you do seek out people of like interests, and that’s not to say anything negative about all of our neighbors around here, but we’re just all on our ways, doing different things in our lives. We travel pretty good distances to see other musicians, people of more like-mind. This is a wonderful place to live, though; Spring Grove is an amazing community. I’m so pleased that we ended up here for so many reasons: we’ve got cooperatives, and arts - Spring Grove is very arts- oriented - some good folks.

PN: Anything you think I ought to be asking?

GH: We do run a dance, too.

PN: Talk about that. I forgot about that.

BB: One thing we didn’t talk about is dance, really. So much of Old Time music is dance music, which was what it is for. When Gail and I first got together and she was going to move to the Twin Cities, we talked about the fact that there was not an Old Time square dance in the Cities. And so, I got together with a couple of the other musicians that I played with there - Pop Wagner and Matt Haney, and we scouted around and found a venue where we could do a dance on an off night…and we started the Monday Night Square Dance. Monday night because musicians usually don’t have gigs on Monday night, so we could all come there even though we didn’t make any money to speak of, playing for this dance. Gail moved to the Cities like two weeks after that, and immediately started calling dances and playing at that dance, too. It became really quite a successful event; happened every Monday night for about maybe 10 years. Now it’s twice a month, I guess. But sometimes we’d have 250 people at that dance in those earlier days, so we

15 were very tied into doing dance and doing the old style: squares and big circles. When we moved to the country, I guess we’d been here a few years, we decided that we needed something like that around here, so we started the Lanesboro Bam Dance, using the little Sons of Norway hall in Lanesboro; this is our 16th year of those dances. It’s always a live, two or three-piece band and a caller. It’s another real community dance; we get people bring their kids, and we get some old folks who come who just watch. It’s something that a lot of people in this area look forward to.

GH: I want to say one other thing about starting these events down here which have helped us, not always financially tremendously from the venues themselves, but from people hearing about us, and then calling us for jobs and so forth. I do want to say, that if there had not been some small grants available when we started, I probably never would not have gotten the Bluff Country off the ground, or the dances. Over the years there have been years that we haven’t had grant money for the Gathering and the dances, but this last year we had a really nice grant.

BB: Yes, we’ve had grants from the State Arts Board, and we’ve had grants from the Southeast Minnesota Arts Council. In the early days of our dance, we had grants, for a few years, from the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old Time Music Association, too, so those really helped us get established.

GH: Every little bit helps.

PN: There was another thing I wanted to address, and that’s the kids coming up playing it now. People of our vintage, getting interested in Old Time music with the preservation mentality that existed then, if we wanted to be eclectic, maybe we’d just pick up the electric guitar and start playing Rock-n-Roll. But today, the kids would never think to copy, they would just play the songs in a way that seems natural to them; they seem to spend less time learning from the old masters and more time interpreting. I’d like you to put words on that.

BB: That’s a pretty big generalization...

GH: I’d like to say, “Yes!” and “No!” to what you said [Laughing].

BB: I can think of some young players, and I’m talking about anywhere from 20 to early 30s players, who have listened really hard to the old recordings or older players and learned those styles. My own prejudice, but those tend to be my favorite players of the young ones that I’ve heard. There are a lot of younger players who, as we’ve said, have come from a different place, who maybe came out of the Punk music movement and saw similarities in that and Old Time music - kind of a raw sound and a certain freedom, and their approach to Old Time is a little different. It’s good that there are all these different choices, and there are people interested in playing it is all these ways.

GH: I want to just say one thing about Bruce Molsky who is just this wildly popular fiddler…

PN: Tommy Jarrell, Bruce Molsky, then everybody…

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GH: …but I mean, for instance, Bruce had a little student whose name now I can’t remember – Hargreaves…

PN: Tatiana Hargreaves.

GH: Well, Tatiana won the fiddle contest at Clifftop, which is a formidable thing to do, last year or the year before. And someone was talking to Bruce about that, because, if course, she played and sounded almost exactly like Bruce because she had learned from him. He said, “She’s only going to get better as she starts going back to sources.” And this is kind of what all the really good fiddle players these days are doing - they’re learning, and many of them have come out of Classical and they’re dynamite! They can execute just about anything, but they really start becoming fabulous fiddle players when they go to the sources, and there are so many sources available these days; I’m not talking about Bruce, I’m talking about the early sources.

PN: Everything’s available.

BB: And they will put their own touch on those things even after they’ve gone and learned from the masters, just like Bruce. Bruce went and learned from Tommy Jarrell and learned from the old recordings, but nobody plays like he does, he has created his own style, too, but it’s pretty well rooted in those traditions that he learned from.

PN: Or like Beth Rotto did with Sherburne.

BB: Yes, and when you were asking about how much we have studied the music in this area, she is the one who has done that. She has learned from the old timers and dug up old family recordings and so on, and is really perpetuating the music from this area and doing a great job of it.

PN: So, you’re saying that from the new generation coming up that there are those who go to the source and those who that’s not they’re strength.

GH: But it’s always gonna be that way, there are a lot of musicians in our generation who just play festival versions of everything, they play watered down…

BB: You should explain what you mean by that.

GH: I mean when there are 40 people sitting around in a jam playing “Shove That Pig’s Foot A Little Farther Into the Fire”, which is one of my favorite Old Time fiddle tune titles, if you’re not really, really passionate about going back to the sources, then you’re going to sit there and you’re going to draw the melody as you can hear it with 30 fiddlers playing it, and it means you’re going to miss a lot of stuff. That’s a festival version in my estimation. There are many, many fiddlers of all generations who are going to do that, and then there are the source people. Maybe it’s the difference between a microbiologist and a - there are a lot of fiddle players who are microbiologists, by the way, Old Time fiddle players, that’s why I mention that, and now the

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only one I can think of is Chirp Smith, but there are a lot of them. So who would the festival- version players be? I don’t want to say bankers - what would their occupations be?

PN: I think, in Minnesota, at least in the Twin Cities, Old Time is a happenin’ thing.

GH: Oh yeah.

PN: It’s like more of a happenin’ thing, I think, than Bluegrass. All of these jam sessions in coffee houses. I don’t know if you think that’s a good thing. I think they’re all learning occasions. I think it’s a big part of Old Time culture when people get together to play, they’re really interested in learning tunes from each other. The vibe I get in Bluegrass is demonstrating what you know.

GH: Well that’s the whole difference: Bluegrass is performance and Old Time is community ... don’t you think so?

BB: To a certain extent. So much of Old Time music is, as we said, dance music, but also, it has become a social thing; it’s just fun to get together with your friends and play these tunes. And you can be at a real beginning level and it’s less threatening playing in a situation where you’re all playing an ensemble version of a tune; you’re playing together rather than taking individual breaks and putting yourself out on a limb, in a sense.

GH: I’m sure in Bluegrass jams it’s the same way, but I mean, the focus in general of what Bluegrass, having grown out of Old Time was, was for performance - isn’t that what Bill Monroe wanted to do?

PN: He was a fulltime professional when he started The Bluegrass Boys, that was a commercial idea, and the re-orchestration he did turned out to be a great idea.

BB: You’ll find very few of the older Old Time bands who recorded, that did anything similar with breaks, as opposed to playing all together.

GH: Spotlighting, hotshot breaks…

BB: There were a few, like the Hillbillies, Al Hopkins and the Buckle Busters, but they were a fulltime, performing band who were working the Vaudeville circuit, so they weren’t just playing dance music, they were doing things that spotlighted all the different instruments, but that’s less the case with most Old Time music.

PN: Well, I could cease and desist.

GH: Yeah, should we have a snack?

PN: Or as they say around here, “A little lunch.” [Laughing]

GH: I haven’t started saying that yet, I’ve only been here 22 years. [Laughing]

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PN: Well, I just want to say thanks for consenting to this.

BB: Thank you.

GH: It was very enjoyable, actually.

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