Keep It Old-Time: Fiddle Music in Missouri from the 1960s Folk Music Revival to the Present by Howard Wight Marshall

Together with Play Me Something Quick and Devilish (2013) and Fiddler’s Dream (2017), this third volume on Missouri fiddling represents a lifelong fascination with the world of music. As in the previous two volumes, Howard Marshall seeks out the people, stories, and communities that make informal, traditional music for their own enjoyment, particularly folk-singing, bluegrass, old-time fiddling, and jazz. Play Me Something Quick and Devilish addressed what we know of fiddle and dance music from the early French settlements in the mid-1700s colonial period into the World War I era and the Jazz Age. Fiddler's Dream recounted the 1920s and moved through the Great Depression and World War II years and stopped in the 1960s. Keep It Old-Time picks up the saga in the complicated 1960s and winds down in the early twenty-first century. Along the way, Marshall presents historical and documentary discussions of music interwoven with ample quotes from musicians and, at certain points, his own personal reflections and experiences in the music scene. Some of the topics featured in this volume are the folk music revival of the 1960s, the emergence of folk and bluegrass festivals, the continuation of fiddle contests, the evolving education of musicians, and many profiles of musicians, famous both locally and nationally. Oral history, archival photographs, and transcriptions of selected fiddle tunes complement the text as does the companion CD of selected songs.

About the Author

Howard Wight Marshall is Professor Emeritus and former chairman of Art History and Archaeology, and former director of the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After working as a museum curator in Indiana and at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, Marshall returned to Columbia to establish the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center. While at Mizzou, he also taught material culture, vernacular architecture, and historic preservation in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. He has written several books on art and music, including Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri and Fiddler’s Dream: Old-Time, Swing, and Bluegrass Fiddling in Twentieth-Century Missouri, which won the Missouri Conference on History’s Best Book Award for 2018. Also in 2018, Marshall won the Missouri Humanities Council’s 2018 Distinguished Literary Award.

Product Specifications

Published by University of Missouri Press, 2023.  Hardback, 504 pages.