In my ongoing fiddle tune research, I stumbled across Howe’s Musician’s Omnibus (click HERE for a full download of three of the volumes of the book). Elias Howe (check his full Wikipedia bio HERE) was a fiddle player who collected and wrote down tunes for musicians in New England. He started selling his books door-to-door, and eventually ended up selling thousands of copies. The Omnibus is in seven volumes and provides an excellent glimpse into the tunes that fiddlers were playing in the mid to late 1800’s.
In my studies of Upper Midwest music and the dance tunes that Charles “Pa” Ingalls might have played in Wisconsin and Minnesota, I would not have normally looked at a book published in Boston. Until, that is, I began studying the source recordings of Iva Dingwall. She is a fiddler who was a contemporary of Laura Ingalls Wilder and wrote similar childhood accounts about accompanying her father who fiddled at dances near Elk River, Minnesota in the late 1800’s. After learning her tunes and reviewing the Musician’s Omnibus, I realized that the versions that Iva played came from this book. (Click HERE to learn more about Iva Dingwall, and HERE to listen to her recordings from 1953.) This means that for those Upper Midwest fiddlers who came to the area from the eastern United States may have brought this book with them.
I am now thinking that the music from Howe’s Musicians Omnibus is a good source of tunes that “Pa” might have played at his dances. He might not have owned the book, or been able to read music at all, but he was likely influenced by other fiddlers who played these “versions of the day.”
