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 1 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 2 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. 3 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.