Beginning with the French villages on the Mississippi River, Marshall leads us chronologically through the settlement of the state and how these communities established our cultural heritage. Other core populations include the “Old Stock Americans” (primarily Scotch-Irish from Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia), African Americans, German-speaking immigrants, people with American Indian ancestry (focusing on Cherokee families dating from the Trail of Tears in the 1830s), and Irish railroad workers in the post–Civil War period. These are the primary communities whose fiddle and dance traditions came together on the Missouri frontier to cultivate the bounty of old-time fiddling enjoyed today.

Howard Wight Marshall is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Missouri-Columbia and former director of the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center. He lives near Fulton, MO.

Full bio: 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 in Columbia.

After dropping out of college to join the Marine Corps in the early 1960s, Marshall took his BA in English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and then took his MA and PhD in Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University. He wrote his dissertation based on extensive field recording of traditional farm buildings in Missouri’s Little Dixie folk region.

Then after graduate school, Dr. Marshall worked briefly as director of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and then for several years as a curator and planner at a living history museum in Indiana, and consulted for the Smithsonian Institution. He then was called to a position at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. While in Washington, he taught a night course in architectural history at George Washington University.

Marshall left the Library of Congress after five years in 1981 to teach at Kansas State University. In 1982, he returned to Columbia to establish the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center in the Graduate School at the University of Missouri, and to teach material culture, vernacular architecture, and historic preservation in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. After the closing of the Cultural Heritage Center in 1993 (due to a campus budget crisis), Marshall served as professor and department chair in Art History and Archaeology, and took early retirement in 2000.

Dr. Marshall’s books include Buckaroos in Paradise: Cowboy Life in Paradise Valley, Nevada, Folk Architecture in Little Dixie: A Regional Culture in Missouri, Missouri Artist Jesse Howard, The German-American Experience in Missouri, Barns of Missouri: Storehouses of History, and Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri. Dr. Marshall’s latest book is Fiddler’s Dream: Old-Time, Swing, and Bluegrass Fiddling in Twentieth-Century Missouri, which continues the ethnography and discussion in Play Me Something Quick and Devilish.

Marshall plays the music he studies and writes about. He credits the memory of his grandfather, Wiley Marshall, a country schoolmaster and fiddler in Randolph County, with inspiring him to want to play the old dance tunes on the violin. Later, Marshall learned tunes and techniques from central Missouri fiddle legends such as Taylor McBaine, Jake Hockemeyer, Johnny Bruce, Nile Wilson, and Pete McMahan.

Dr. Marshall confesses that the best thing about his career was the good luck to meet his spouse, the charming and irrepressible Margot McMillen. Howard and Margot live in northern Callaway County, where they operate a small livestock farm.

“Social history, music history, and biography all intermingle to illustrate the rich heritage of Fiddle playing in Missouri. In many ways the history and diversity of Missouri reflects that of the United States during the same time frame, and in this respect the book is more than a regional study….This is an excellent book for anyone interested in fiddle music past and present, or indeed music in the United States from about the late 1700s through the 1930s.”—Folk Music Journal
 
“The broader narrative carries Missouri fiddle history through the 1920s, but many of those biographies bring us much closer to the present. Marshall manages the breadth of Missouri’s fiddling traditions by taking a regional focus. Similar to many studies of American fiddling, Marshall’s regional approach is also evident in historical treatments of fiddling as well as in various tune collections written by other researchers.”—Journal of American Folklore
 
“Supplemented by musical transcriptions created by Sharon Graf, Brian Pryor, and Kristen Tourville; an accompanying compact disc with thirty-nine recordings; and sumptuous illustrations. An engaging, comprehensive study, Play Me Something Quick and Devilish is a resource that should be valuable to scholars of traditional music in the United States, as well as to the very practitioners it discusses, for years to come.”—Journal of Southern History
 
“Play Me Something Quick and Devilish is a model for scholars who wish to contribute to our knowledge of music by researching a particular state’s history of instrumental music. We can gain a rich sense of old-time fiddling within our nation’s history by reading and comparing state studies, and Missouri’s situation is particularly important in this regard.”—Western Folklore

“All-in-all, Marshall’s text offers a comprehensive look at a music that most of us know of, but not about; a music that, though not given its rightful due, can still be heard both in its ‘pure’ form, and also as a component of much contemporary popular music.”—Matt Smith-Lahrman, New Books Network

“Missouri is famous for its fiddling tradition and this book goes a long way toward revealing the vitality and vibrancy of that tradition.”—Bob Buckingham, Fiddler Magazine

“Indispensable for studies in American music, this book includes a thorough bibliography with hundreds of interviews, notes, books cited, and an index. A very impressive effort.”—Linda Beck, Library Journal

“A history of music and a history of Missouri, ‘Play Me Something Quick and Devilish’ is a must for music history collections, very much recommended.”—James A. Cox, The Midwest Book Review

“Every so often, a research volume comes along that is so engaging that one forgets its genre. This beautifully organized and eminently enjoyable book covers old-time fiddlers in Missouri – the crossroads of American culture for several centuries.This phenomenally entertaining and glorious volume should grace the library of every musician and historian. Bravo, Professor Marshall!”—Mary McWay Seaman, The Celtic Connection