Keep It Old-Time

Explores the people, stories, and communities that make informal, traditional music for their own enjoyment, particularly folk-singing, bluegrass, old-time fiddling, and jazz. Along the way, Howard Marshall presents historical and documentary discussions of music interwoven with ample quotes from musicians and his own personal reflections.

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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.