Letter from Ole Bull to Sara Thorp
by Jeff Todd Titon
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 117, No. 465 (Summer, 2004), pp. 316-324
[JEFF TODD TITON is Professor of Music and Director of the Ph.D. program in ethnomusicology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island]
[This great letter, which is really an adventure story with a fiddle contest, references Fire in the Mountains and other old-time fiddle tunes. R. Matteson 2011]
Notes
JEFF TODD TITON
Letter from Ole Bull to Sara Thorp
The following undated letter from the famous nineteenth-century Norwegian violin virtuoso, Ole Bull, to the American, Sara Thorp (later Sara Thorp Bull), was found among the papers of Sara Bull in Madison, Wisconsin. Internal evidence suggests that
the letter was written early in the year 1869. Whether it ever was posted, or whether Bull delivered it in person, is not known.
My dear sweet Sara,
When I promised to write you about my Kentucky adventures on this latest American tour, I could not have foretold the singular encounter that took place on the night of 4 December 1868. Now that I have returned to civilization I wonder whether I dreamed it. I believe I fell in with native violinists even more rough-hewn than the hardanger fiddlers I know in Norway. But dear miss, I am ahead of myself. I was proceeding northwest along the Ohio River. As you know, I dislike steamboats because of the belching smoke and the constant tremor, which sometimes prevents me from sleeping. That night insomnia struck. Near midnight I was out walking on deck, quite alone except for my precious da Salo violin, which as you know, I have with me always. The night was dark and the river mist thick when our steamboat rammed another vessel.
The collision caused me to lose my balance. I lurched forward. The fog made it impossible to see more than five feet in any direction. A few seconds later, one loud explosion was followed by another. Through the mist I saw a conflagration behind me, the flames reaching nearly to the height of the smokestack. I did not hesitate, but jumped overboard, raising my da Salo high above my head. It being late fall, the temperature of the water was colder than I would have wished, but this was preferable to the heat I left on the steamboat. I swam to the nearest side of the river and pulled myself out. The fire behind me provided such light as I needed to scramble up a path on the riverbank. The flames of hell could not have burned more brightly. I looked back toward the steamboat but could see no one. Indeed, I had seen no one since the explosion and fire. The boat by this time was listing to port and sinking. I had left my money on the steamboat. My wet, muddy clothes and dry da Salo were now my only possessions.
Atop the tangled bank I could see no sign of human or animal. I did not know then that I had chosen the Kentucky side of the river. As I continued, the mist dissipated, the moon appeared, and I reckoned that I was heading south along the Kentucky side. I hoped to find a cottage where I might implore the owner for lodging. I envisioned a cozy fire and a tidy parlor with the family gathered 'round while I fiddled in exchange for my board and lodging. Imagine!-and it was past midnight! But finding no place to rest, I fashioned a walking stick from a maple branch and plunged ahead, veering deeper into the forest and following a watercourse southwest. I began to wonder what wild creature I might encounter. There could be an Indian behind any tree, I thought. What if I should encounter the devil himself? Wishing to avoid being attacked by a bear, bitten by a poisonous snake, or scalped by a wild Indian, I made haste through the forest. A human life is nothing here. Usually I am afraid of robbers and I keep an eye on my things, but now I had nothing but a maple stick and my da Salo!
At length the terrain grew steep. I grew tired and slowed to a walk. I could hear the watercourse running below. Although it was not a particularly cold night, I shivered in my drying clothes. Surely I would catch a fever and would have to treat myself with
cold water, fast, sweat, take cold baths, and exercise. Yet, I took heart. I thought of my climb to the top of Snohetta. I am not sure I told you, but before journeying to your American nation for the first time, I made my way through rain, sleet, and snow to the highest peak in Norway, then played my violin from the mountaintop!
How long I walked, I cannot tell, but it must have been many hours because the moon, which had been low in the sky when I began, was high overhead when I heard the sound of violins. I thought my ears were playing tricks on me. Could it have been a fossegrim? This trickster is found near waterfalls. The hardanger fiddlers tell of one of these devils who taught a fiddler to play a tune so well that the dancers could not stop. Even the chairs and tables began to dance! Nor was the fiddler able to cease playing until they had all danced themselves to death. They said the only way to stop it was to cut the fiddler's strings. Of course I put no stock in these old wives' tales. Still, this was a strange and wild country.
I shook my head back and forth but the sound would not leave. I caught hold of a tree for support, lest I sink down on the ground. Then I made out the clucking of a hen. In truth, as I learned later, it was a banjo. Although this instrument has some currency among the English, in Europe it is scarcely known. I moved closer.
I was reminded more than a little of the hardanger violin music I heard in Oster Island as a child. This was not my native music, but neither was it the trivial dance music of cheap American entertainments. Have I confided my hopes to you that in some mountain fastness your America might have rendered a wilder native music? My hopes were being realized! The melodies were stark, yet not without decoration. Like the hardanger fiddlers, these fiddlers, or water-sprites if they were that, kept the bow on two, sometimes three, strings at once, providing a primitive harmony (and occasionally a keen discord) on the open strings.
I moved closer and saw that musicians were sitting on boulders in a kind of circle, underneath a large rock formation projecting out over the riverbank. This natural amphitheater increased the music's resonance, while the sound of the running river was like a ground bass. Near the circle they kept a fire to ward off the cold. The sounds of their music drowned out any sounds I made as I stumbled around and at length crouched down where I could see them clearly. They were about three rods away from me, and so absorbed in their music that they did not notice me. I saw that most were dressed in homespun although a few wore pieces of military clothing, a leftover from your great Civil War. The violinists held their instruments against the chest as the old Norwegian country fiddlers do. They held a shorter bow, as I do, by keeping the hand a few inches up from the frog. I listened further and without much difficulty I was able to put the melody in my mind and think improvisations on it.
The music went on for several minutes. It put me into a swoon. After the melody stopped the men conversed a little while adjusting the tuning of their instruments. They also passed around a jug containing homemade whiskey. I had heard of such gatherings of hardanger violinists in western Norway. These could not be fossegrims! Feelings of brotherhood passed through me and I impulsively rose to join them. Giving a loud "Hallo!" I stepped into the clearing. I must have been quite an apparition, disheveled as I was, fiddle case in one hand, maple stick in the other, my suit coated with dried mud, the cloth torn by the brambles I had walked through. But I was not thinking of that then. I should have been very tired, but I was exhilarated. I had discovered the music of your nation that I had been looking for.
The musicians seemed surprised and yet there was a look of recognition among them as they spied my violin case, nodded and spoke tentatively among themselves. I could not make out what they said. One man wearing a military coat called out to me in a tremblingt one. "Welli, f it isn't Old Scratch!W hatd o you want with us?" I stretched to my manly height." Olds cratch? No, my name is Ole Bornemann Bull." Unfortunately, my name made no impression. "I am the Norwegian violin virtuoso. I am known for my sweet tone; I am certainly not 'old scratch,"' I said, a nd paused. They looked puzzled.
I continued,"I have b een touring your great young nation. Perhaps you have heard of me? Ole Bull?" Still puzzlement. I took a breath and continued. "I am lost. My steamboat caught fire on the Ohio and all I could rescue was my da Salo and the clothing on my back, such as it must now be. Somehow I swam to land and by the light of the moon I have walked all night hoping to find a cabin. Instead I found you."
They looked skeptical. "Fire, you say? You escaped from a fire," said the man with the banjo. Tall and thin, with deep-set blue eyes, he had a scruffy red beard and his hairh ung to his narrows, loping shoulders.
The man in the military coat repeated what he had said before. What did I want with them?" Well, "I volunteered," maybe a taste of what is in that jug, and then a little more music!" They passed it to me and I lifted it to my lips. The whiskey burnt my throat on the way down. The men spoke quietly among themselves again. At length red-beard reached into a pot near the fire, extracted what looked like a piece of mutton, and offered it to me. His hand shook a little. "You must be hungry. Will you eat?"
I could not help thinking of another of those old wives' tales about the fossegrim. In exchange for teaching the fiddle, the visitor is supposed to feed the little imp. If the food is bad, the fossegrim teaches the visitor to tune the fiddle but not to play it. Ha! But I was hungry, and I ate the mutton.
"Now we'd like to hear you play your fiddle," said the man with the red beard. I could only comply with their request and so, before putting my da Salo to my shoulder, I thought for a moment about what to play. Old scratch indeed! I would show them. My mind was empty except for the tune I had heard them play moments before. And so I played their melody a time or two and began improvising on it. The men listened intently, puzzled. After a few moments I ended with a flourish. The musicians conferred again.
"We expect you want a contest with us," the man in the military coat said. "If it's all the same to you, three of us will step forward for that. The rest of the men will be the judges," he added, smiling a little.
I was familiar with contests among the country fiddle players in Norway, and I quicklya greed. My thoughts were not turned t oward winning, for no matter how well I played, I knew the judges would not award me the prize. Instead, I hoped that I might make a good impression and share some music. My thoughts of a cozy cabin in which to spend the chilly night had vanished and I was fully taken up with this encounter. And so I told them that I would be glad to participate in their contest, but I would take my turn after they had finished.
The first fiddler stepped forward and tuned his violin from the discord into standard tuning. He was small in stature and moved with a slight limp into the center of the circle. He could not have been more than thirty years old, but he had spent most of his time outdoors, and his leather-tanned, lined face made him look much older. A scar like a bolt of lightning ran down his right cheek. I judged him a hunter. "My name is Flannery," he said to me. "I will play 'The Forked Deer.'" With that introduction he began a piece that I took to imitate the movements of a deer in the woods, first walking and then stopping to feed, then walking again, then feeding, and so forth. I had not heard it before. A little like "Arkansas Traveler" in the high part, the melody was more interesting than the hackneyed "Traveler."I n the low part, Mr. Flannery droned continuously on an adjacent string while he played the contrasting melody that to my mind represented the deer feeding. He played it vigorously and loudly, and when it was over I had only admiration for the performance. Evidently he and the others thought it was good also, and he stepped back into the group.
The next fiddler said, "I am Risner. I'm going to give a little bit of 'The Devil's Dream.' " Risner had the appearance of an enterprising farmer. Middle-aged, barrelchested, short-legged, with long sideburns and with tufts of hair exiting his nose to join a handlebar moustache, he looked like he had fed well and often on venison, rabbit, and squirrel. He blew on his large hands to warm them, then motioned for the whiskey jug. The deference with which the jug was passed made me think he might have been its supplier. Making corn whiskey is a profitable industry in this section, I had been told. I had heard Mr. Risner's piece before, but in Boston. More than once while playing he looked over at me to see my expression which, I imagined, was one of concentration; for I had determined that for my contest performance I would combine all three of their tunes, and I wanted to be sure to remember them all. But this was a conventional piece and would give me no trouble whatsoever. Mr. Risner's playing was thorough; he gave every note its due and he negotiated the intricate high part without fault or flamboyance. His left hand swallowed up the neck of his violin. His fingers looked like dancing bananas. He, or someone he learned the tune from, had altered the melody from the one that I knew, a little for the better, I thought. In fact, he altered the melody a little each time he played it through; I took them to be memorized variations, not improvisations composed spontaneously. Before Mr. Risner departed he gave me another long look. I smiled at him and he nodded his head.
The third fiddler advanced. "My name is Shadrack Slone, and I'll commence to play 'The Brushy Fork of John's Creek.' " Slone was a young man and an excellent musician; his tune was one of those mournful yet vigorous melodies such as I had heard from this group when I first fell upon them. Coming back to myself, I thought I had heard Mr. Slone humming to set the lower strings vibrating while he played on the upper strings. Was I dreaming? One note was deliberately sharped each time. Other discords appeared and vanished as the melody moved against the drones. He must have flattened the curvature of his bridge, like mine, to allow playing on three strings at once. His violin was tuned low and he kept his bow-hair loose. These techniques I had learned from hardanger violinists but I was baffled to see them here. How had they gotten to this godforsaken place?
Unlike the programmatic pieces I play, this tune did not imitate the natural world at all, but it evoked that world with a flood of emotion, chiefly sadness and longing, and perhaps regret. I had heard nothing so profound. This surely rivaled the hardanger music. Not so intricate but more elemental. Nothing for show. This could not be a tune for dancing or for the minstrel stage. It summoned the spirits of the place.
Mr. Slone had almost fallen into a swoon himself. He had set the violin against his chest and bent over it, his body in a curve, moving to the rhythms of the music. He tilted the violin to one side or the other to put his bow on different strings. Slone was not an old man, yet the tune seemed as old as this river and the surrounding hills. I forced myself to come to hearing the tones so that I could memorize them for my entrance into the contest, and just as I did so Mr. Slone stopped. There was a moment of silence as everyone stood transfixed. Clearly he was the best of the lot and this was a special tune. Now it was my turn.
I raised my violin to my chin but I could not remember the first two tunes played. "The Brushy Fork of John's Creek" was all that echoed in my mind. I thought for what must have been only a few seconds but seemed an eternity. Then I re-tuned my violin into the discord tuning, lowered it to my chest, and commenced to play the tune Mr. Slone had given out. I started slowly and softly. The men began to nod their heads as they stared at me. As I cycled through the tune again and again I played it faster and louder. I introduced some improvisations, simple at first and then farther afield. At the close I returned to the main melody and played it as fast as I could. The men were staring at my fiddle and bow intensely. Then with a flourish I stopped and put my da Salo back into its case.
The judges conferred among themselves for a few minutes. Mr. Slone was the winner. I had been disqualified because I had strayed too far from the tune. Some of the judges thought my improvisations mocked the melody. "Not at all!" I protested. "These improvisations are part of what goes into making a virtuoso." I told them how, in my concerts, I would improvise on common melodies whose names people in the audience called out.
"Well," said Mr. Slone, "we don't play concerts for no fancy people. We play for dancing, mostly, and for ourselves. Contests, some. That's easy money for the winners. But to me," he went on, "this changing the tune around so you can't hardly recognize it at all, it's just not right."
The others kept silent. I was not a little upset and in a mood to argue. In Europe some of the critics had called me a charlatan. "It is no trick. It is the sign of true musical genius to compose spontaneously while playing for an audience. Mozart and Beethoven did it. The great Paganini was my model."
"Who?" Mr. Slone obviously lacked the capacity to appreciate virtuosity. He went on. "In our kind of music we sometimes change it around, some. But we don't turn the tune inside out, the way you do. We don't think of ourselves as the Potter with the clay." I thought about his analogy a minute. I had known potters in Norway. Some of their designs were brilliant. "Why not? It is the genius of man to create."
"Pride," said Mr. Flannery. "The genius of man. It's Old Scratch, for sure." These men's minds were as narrow as the mountains surrounding us. They had not been to Paris! Theirs was the scratchy tone, not mine.
I changed the subject. "Well," I said, "look here, Mr. Slone, that tune you played is striking. It sounds as old as time itself. Who is the composer? Where is John's Creek?" "Pike County," Mr. Slone replied. He stopped and gave me a penetrating look. "This tune is only a few years old. Kind of a memorial. Kentucky was a battleground, you know. Morgan's Raiders come through there."
"It brings to mind the music played in my native Norway, the hardanger violin music." I was getting excited. "I do not suppose that in this forlorn corner of the world you have ever heard that! Of course I lack that kind of violin, here, now, but this is close to what it sounds like." I took my da Salo from its case and began to play a piece I had learned from Augundson when we concertized together.
The men were curious and, I thought, appreciative. The piece was a dance tune and it seemed to interest them. They asked for some more pieces like that and I obliged, happily. I wondered if they might be able to play along, so I chose a simple one and invited them to join in. This caused a stir, but after a while they did; and I was surprised at how quickly they learned it. And then another, and another. I did not dare improvise, for it would only have confused them.
After a while I asked for more tunes like "The Brushy Fork of John's Creek." They came up with several, and the names as well as the tunes were affecting. How I wish I could remember them all! "Coal Harbor Bend" was named for a place in the river, "Fontaine's Ferry" for a ferry, and "Pharaoh" referred to the sound made by locusts! This time I played along. I felt no desire to improvise on those melodies. I liked blending my sound with theirs.
At length the man with the red beard asked if he could play my violin. The other men looked at him as if he had been too bold, but I was willing to comply. No one, I had thought, could play my da Salo! You remember the story I told you about what happened in Paris with the soprano Malibran and the violinist Charles-Auguste de Beriot. The latter played some of his own compositions, quite neatly. Then it was my turn. I had hardly begun my prelude when Mademoiselle Malibran cried, "Ah, how sweet your violin sounds," and to Monsieur Beriot she said, "His violin has a softer tone than yours. Try it a little." But after some attempts, Beriot returned the violin to me and said, "Your violin is bewitched!" They wanted to know what I could produce on a violin that even Beriot could not handle. I began improvising dark chords, in which all the strings vibrated at the same time, a melody and its simultaneous accompaniment, for I had flattened the curve of my bridge, and with more pressure of the bow I could play on three, even four, strings simultaneously.
I thought for a moment before handing my da Salo to these rough men. Would they have any idea what they were holding in their hands? I looked over at red-beard and with a quick gesture I moved the da Salo toward him. Until now he had been playing the banjo, but he took my da Salo, put it to his chest and received rapt attention from everyone present-none more interested than I. He moved his bow over the strings as if to make certain of where they were, and then began to play. He had no trouble with my altered bridge. It was as if I had recognized a distant relative. How I wished that Jens Hogheim had been there to hear it.
What a delight to hear my precious da Salo off my ear! Red-beard had chosen to play one of the tunes I had introduced to them. I was surprised by how well he played it back. "What do you call this one?" he asked, when he had done. "It is called 'Fire in the Mountains.' It is a halling tune, one that accompanies a men's dance. Maybe I should call it 'Fire in the Steamboat!' For it was that fire that brought me to you."
By the time the sun rose in the east we had made music together for many hours. When I grew tired, I took out a piece of paper and wrote down the music to one of the tunes I especially liked. I requested "The Brushy Fork of John's Creek" from Mr. Slone, and he obliged while I noted it down. He said that he had seen people reading music from pieces of paper, but not this kind of music." Well," I said," in Norway I have transcribed many hardanger violin pieces from my friends. I have even performed concerts with those hardanger violinists." For a brief moment I envisioned concertizing with Mr. Flannery or Mr. Slone in America. No, it would be impossible.
My hands were sore and my head was aching from the whiskey. As the sun rose higher a skiff passed in the river below, headed north for the Ohio. I bade the men good-bye and boarded the skiff, thanking them for the evening's music. I never saw them again.
And so, my dear Sara, ended my adventure with the musicians from Kentucky. I had found the wilder music that I had sought, among the natives of your nation in the forest of Kentucky.
Yours truly,
Ole Bull