I have two blogs. . . . Just as I have two worlds that I live in; two communities that I belong to. On the one hand, I am a scholarly thinker…
Author: Paul Tyler
Kurtz Collection of Fiddler’s Tunes
In 1944, two fiddle tunes were printed in California Folklore Quarterly, then a new academic journal still published as Western Folklore. One tune appeared in a note authored by Homer H. Kurtz;…
National Barn Dance Centennial Tribute
100 years ago, April 19 was a Saturday, and in Chicago it was the first of a long string of Saturday nights that featured a live broadcast of the National Barn Dance…
William B. Houchens – violinist/fiddler
The recording career of William B. Houchens of Dayton, Ohio. 1922-24.
Old 78s heard on DrDosido “CDs”
At some point in my twenties, I devoted myself to learning and performing traditional folk music. Most people referred to the music they heard me play as ‘bluegrass,’ ‘mountain’ or ‘Appalachian’ music….
An Adventure with Dance Tune Manuscripts
Events of this past week have prompted me to renew my venture into the world of 18th and 19th Century musical manuscripts. My main interest is with notebooks compiled, used, and passed…
DrDosido.net 3.0 – The Makeover
Months ago, I promised to blog about the rebuild of my website, drdosido.net. The rebuild went live last summer, but my blogging went dead. Part of it was that WordPress and I…
DrDosido. net 3.0 is coming
Version 1.0 appeared in 2010 as I marked my 60th birthday by posting fiddle tunes and other traditional folk music I had recorded over the previous 30-plus years. Some weird obsession led…
Indiana Fiddle Bands I (DDCD-112 )
Though I am a few days late, I would like to kick off this planned series of posts with an item that honors my native state of Indiana. In 2016, Hoosiers celebrated…
Neil Rosenberg, Dean of Bluegrass Scholars
Neil Rosenberg, folklorist and author of Bluegrass: A History is visiting Chicago this week. He and his wife Terri will be part of a public conversation and performance on Friday (2/26) at…
The National Barn Dance
Happy 90th birthday. (I missed it by a day.) It was on April 19, 1924, a Saturday, that the National Barn Dance began it’s 36-year run on radio station WLS in Chicago. …
DrDosido and Mr. Seeger
Like any respectable folkie I sang along with Pete Seeger in concert several times. All that took, of course, was a ticket. The somber news of his passing, and the many well-deserved…
A Guided Tour of DrDosido.net 2.0
Want to hear the music I’ve recorded in musicians’ homes and at community events over the last bunch of years (starting in 1976)? This post will show you how to get there…
The Remaking of DrDosido
Welcome to 2.0 So here’s how it all started. As summer 2010 ended, I was approaching my 60th birthday. I visited a bookstore and bought a couple of beginner’s books on how…
Back to backlog
You all figured out, of course, that Do-si-do is French for ‘back to back.’ I will set a few more square dance puns into this post intended to forward my plans for…
Dyngus Day
In 1987, as part of my Indiana Arts Commission grant project on Ethnic Dance Music in Northern Indiana, I visited South Bend to witness one of the largest Dyngus Day celebrations in…
The Search for German Old-Time Music
More accurately, today’s topic is the old-time music played by musicians from German communities around Hoagland, Indiana. The question of how much of the music played for barn dances and house dances…
A Folksong Autobiography, episode 2 (not in chronological order)
I’ve been trying to remember, but I can’t locate the first seeds of my obsession with the fiddle. It must have had something to do with Hoagland’s passion for square dancing (see…
The importance of being Hoosier
I always have and always will be one. A Hoosier, that is. But I’ve now lived in Chicago nearly half of my life. Twenty-four years, to be exact. The tendencies toward acculturation…
A Folksong Autobiography, episode 1
I must have been about three. My sister was at school. Christmas time was coming and it was cold, so I was playing on the floor under the telephone right next to…
Good German Lutherans
On the home page of this, my website, I wrote “it is right and fitting” at this time to tell my story. What I really wanted to say was “it is meat,…
The scope of this project
I compiled some numbers. To be honest, I am stunned. Thus far I have built 40 web pages for DrDosido.net. At the beginning of October I didn’t have a clue how to…
Where are the tunes?
It has been a month since drdosido.net went online. After I announced it on several fiddle-oriented websites, the first comment I got was “Where are the tunes. I must have missed a…
They didn’t know it yet, . . .
. . . but 60 years ago this coming Friday, Mildred Franke Tyler gave birth to Dr. Dosido, the only son and second child of Wade Edward Tyler. They named him Paul…
The website mostly works.
There are now 88 tunes posted in 6 out of 11 boxes. A few people have even listened to the tunes, and the inevitable corrections and clarifications have started to trickle in. …
Wow. I did it.
Last summer I started to conceptually design my website, but I had zero idea about how to actually get it up and running. I did manage to claim my domain name, and…