Dewitt B. Andrus (Andrews) (1852-1932 (approx.) came to Elk River Minnesota, a community northwest of Minneapolis, from New York, and played the fiddle for local dances during the 1880s. (Minnesota Fiddle Tune Project, http://minnesotafiddle.blogspot.com/2011/12/iva-dingwall.html, retrieved on 6/19/2020). Iva Dingwall (1877 – 1965) learned how to fiddle from her father, and as a child, accompanied him to many of the dances. In 1891, the family moved to Superior, Wisconsin (adjacent to Duluth, Minnesota), where Iva married, raised a family and played and taught music, and wrote articles on her childhood. (Minnesota State Fiddlers Association, www.fiddlmn.com/iva–andrus–dingwall.html, retrieved on 6/19/20).
Iva’s legacy is significant to Upper Midwest fiddling in a number of ways. First, as a female, she is one of the few women who learned and played the fiddle. “(Women) were expected to uphold the conventions of morality, which dictated they should play the piano – the instrument of church and parlor – rather than the fiddle of barn dance and saloon.” (Martin, P., & Koch, L. (1994). Farmhouse fiddlers: Music & dance traditions in the rural Midwest. Mount Horeb, WI: Midwest Traditions., p. 78).
She was recorded in 1953 by Ralph Piper in Superior, Wisconsin playing twelve tunes from her dance hall days. These recordings were posted (Minnesota Fiddle Tune Project, https://archive.org/details/ivadingwall) as part of the Minnesota Fiddle Tune Project lead by “Clawhammer” Mike Sawyer, and give us a glimpse of the types of tunes and style of fiddling popular as a child when no such recordings are available.
There is also another link to those who are fans of the “Little House in the Prairie” book series. Iva (b. 1877, Elk River, MN) is a fairly close contemporary to Laura Ingalls Wilder (b. 1867, Pepin, WI), who included stories of her “Pa” Charles Ingalls and his fiddling through her tales of pioneer life in Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota. Iva’s accounts of dances are similar to Laura’s, but they provide us with a great deal more detail as Iva was a fiddler and Laura was not. Listening to Iva’s recordings gives us a sense of the dance music “Pa” played at the colorful chapter called “Dance at Grandpa’s” (Wilder, L. I. (1932). Little house in the big woods: Ill., by Helen Sewell. New York: Harper.).
On a macro level, Iva’s playing represents the Yankee influence in the Upper Midwest fiddle style. After the American Indian tribes were marshalled out of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, land become available, creating an influx of people like Dewitt Andrus (Andrews) from the New England and New York. For a brief time, they were the predominant culture until the arrival of other foreign-born immigrant groups to the area. Unlike other areas of the country, political power was developed through coalitions of these groups, so anti-nativism was not a common theme during the time of Iva Dingwall. (Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820 to 1910, https://www.loc.gov/collections/pioneering-the-upper-midwest/articles-and-essays/history-of-the-upper-midwest-overview/yankee-empire/, retrieved on 6/19/2020). Musically, this may explain why fiddlers like Iva play tunes from a variety of nationalities, and why Upper Midwest fiddlers continue to do so today.
Iva’s Tunes
Iva’s list includes some very well know chestnuts – Arkansas Traveler, Irish Washerwoman, Devil’s Dream. It also includes Captain Jinks, which is an adaptation of a popular song called Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines published in 1868, but the tune is also an Irish slip jig called John Kelly’s although it is hard to know which came first. This tune is mentioned in the Little House in the Big Woods as a tune that Laura sang.
I was less familiar with the other tunes, but after transcribing all of the tunes, I was working on another fiddle project and found the original digitized collections of Howe’s Musician’s Companion (Boston, 1850) and Howe’s Musician’s Omnibus (Boston, 1863). (For reference, Howe’s became Ryans Mammoth and Cole’s 1000, and the Irish tunes were included in O’Neills – all common fiddle tune books in print today). While combing through the hundreds of pages with thousands of tunes, I ran across eight of Iva’s tunes, written exactly as I had transcribed them. I normally would not have looked a book published in Boston for Upper Midwest tunes, but it appears that this very popular book made its way to the Upper Midwest, and fiddlers either learned tunes from the book or learned these versions from other fiddlers who had. This is also during the time before the phonograph when parlor music and minstrel tunes were sold as sheet music. (History of Music Publishing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_music_publishing, retrieved on 6/19/2020).
I would still might have looked at this as an anomaly, except that Howe’s has tunes that were cited by Laura Ingalls Wilder as being played by her “Pa” (also a Yankee) and Hamlin Garland mentions some of these tunes played by his Uncle David McClintock in LaCrosse, Wisconsin in the book “Son of a Middle Border.” (Hamlin Garland, a son of the middle border. (1932). New York: Macmillan.) Perhaps the clincher was when I found the Woodland Whispers Waltz in Howe’s Omnibus, thought it was familiar, and found I had a source recording of old time Iowa fiddler Al Murphy playing the same tune.
Here are Iva’s tunes that I found in Howe’s Musician’s Companion, along with some historical notes on each one.
Celebrated Opera Reel – This Reel is also called Opera Reel, and is likely Scottish in origin.
Cincinnati Hornpipe – This is a Scottish tune that is played like a reel rather than a hornpipe. The tune sounds like the hornpipe Harvest Home at a faster tempo.
Cicadian – is actually the Cracovienne Quickstep, a Polish dance named for Krakow, the capitol city of Poland. Cracoviennes became popular in Europe before coming to the United States. The dance is supposed emulate a prancing horse.
Life on the Ocean Waves– This is poem set to music was a popular parlor song published in New York in 1838; Iva plays it like a jig.
Old Dan Tucker – This is her take on a popular Southern song, played as a fast square dance reel.
Pop Goes the Weasel – While we think of this as an English children’s song, in Iva’s day it was also a square dance with specific steps.
Sally over the Water – is actually Over the Water to Charley, a common Scottish Highland Fling, turned into a square dance.
Steamboat Quickstep – Canadian tune, likely Quebecois.
Iva’s Dance Sets
While these tunes all come from diverse backgrounds, Iva plays them all as square dance tunes with tempos ranging from 110-120. Her jigs are not like Irish jigs, instead, they are played with a solid 2/4 time, so she is simply changing up from 1 (2) 2 (2) to 1 (2-3) 2 (2-3), but at the same tempo.
These tunes would not have been played as individual performances; instead, they would have been put together to make longer dance sets. In her articles, Iva talked about how she put together her dance tunes, or “changes.” She mentioned that they always played a jig as the last tune in the set. As a fiddler, I have been trying this, and it is taking me some time to adjust to. Again, it is interesting to note that the dance settings that she describes are also listed in Howe’s, and they too, have a jig as the last tune in the set.
In my opinion, by listening to her recordings, you can tell she was a dance fiddler – the rhythms are rock solid and the tempos never vary; they are always around 110-120. This is a technique that only comes through experience. Her playing has a strong downbeat, she puts a lot of weight on the bow, has a shorter, articulated bowing style and uses lots of open string drones for harmony and volume, a useful technique when helping a group of dancers keep the beat. My experience as shown that shorter bow strokes also help with fiddler stamina during a long night of playing.
Click here for Iva’s 1953 recordings, and Click here for a YouTube playlist of these tunes that I have attempted to perform in Iva’s style.
Collected by the Minnesota Fiddle Tunes Project, Michael Sawyer. Original recordings of Iva Dingwall on November 16, 1953 by Ralph Piper in Superior, Wisconsin. Transcriptions by Mary Pat Kleven, 2020
