Going through three big boxes of Minnesota fiddle tapes, I found this great one that I did not know existed. We already had a tape of Elmo playing standard, American, old-time tunes, but it was great to find one that concentrates on the Scandinavian immigrant music that he had done such a great job transcribing to paper. For more info on Elmo and his transcriptions you can go to fiddlemn.com.
These aren't the best recordings of Elmo, but they do give life to some of the tunes we only had transcriptions for. On Phil Nusbaum's field recordings, Elmo plays strong dance fiddling. On this tape it seems like Elmo and Stan aren't always on the same page,, and Elmo is doing more 3rd position backup. Although this provides some context for this tape, it doesn't diminish its importance to us who study the history of Upper Midwest fiddle music.
This recording is made available free for education purposes. If you want to support me and the work that I do getting stuff like this out, you can Venmo: @clawhammermike
No comments:
Post a Comment