Tunes from the Great Lakes

An Incremental Sampler of Recordings

My career in fieldwork got off to inauspicious start. My first interview was with Carl Bischoff, a fiddler and zither player who lived only a half dozen miles away from my mother's house. I also visited Francis Geels, a fiddler in Decatur, Indiana, Herman Fox, a concertinist in Fort Wayne, and interviewed my grandmother on her memories of old-time house dances. Her father was a square dance caller who mostly spoke German, but called the figures in English. For a variety of reasons, these first tapes are practically inaudible.

But I got better, and spent much of the period between 1977 and 1986 recording traditional musicians in three of the States that border Lake Michigan: Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Francis Geels, Herman Fox, and many other fascinating senior masters will both make appearances on these pages. In fact,  here's a photo of one of Herman's early bands.

Artist & Project Roster

• My Bloomington Years
• My Chicago Years
• Indiana Fiddlers Gathering