![\"Ruben](\"https:\/\/drdosido.net\/drdsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Fisher-Augustines_Waltz.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>It was nearly thirty years ago that I got tangled up with a dozen of these old notebooks I found at the Indiana Historical Society, the Newberry Library, and in other institutions and private collections. Ruben M. Fisher\u2019s Notebook<\/em>, from Richland County, Ohio, 1844, was perhaps the most exciting discovery. (Page 5 is displayed to the left.) My initial scholarly inquiries into this area were then interrupted by other projects in the ensuing two decades.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n A most serendipitous recent encounter has fired me up to study once again these treasures from our past. A Chicago friend, and former fiddle student of mine, Elizabeth Lamberti<\/strong>, took a job in Switzerland and met up with European musicians who are enthusiastic about old-time American fiddle music. At a recent workshop in Germany she played a few Midwestern tunes that caught the attention of Stefan Bussemas<\/strong>, a mandolinist with the band Wings on Strings<\/strong> (a performance with his previous band is at the end of this post). He was especially curious about the influence German immigrant musicians may have had on the American folk repertoire. Elizabeth put me in contact with Stefan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Straight away I got an email from Stefan<\/strong> asking \u201cabout German roots in American folk-music.\u201d It is an intriguing question that has been posed by a number of music scholars on this side of the pond, but there is no simple answer. Thirteen years ago on this blog, I made a small contribution to solving that puzzle: The Search for German Old-Time Music<\/em><\/a>. I also referred him to the Indiana Fiddlers<\/em> page of drdosido.net<\/em><\/a>, and told him look for Hugh Sowers<\/strong> and for my name for tunes from Allen County in Northeastern Indiana; and then to scroll down to the entries for Joe Altman<\/strong>, Harold Haug<\/strong>, Herb Obermeyer<\/strong>, Herb Wenning<\/strong>, and Joe Witzberger<\/strong> for German tunes from Dubois County in Southern Indiana. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Stefan<\/strong> also had a wonderful present for me. In his own words: \u201cI really like the tradition of folk-music played for dancers and there is a small but growing community digging out old handwritten collections of dance-music here in Northern Germany. While folk-music is more alive in Bavaria, the northern parts of Germany have only little memories of our own traditions. In the last ten years people were going into archives to find handwritten sheet-music. In the place where I was born and raised, North Rhine-Westphalia, this led to the finding of about 1400 pages of handwritten music, collected by a family of teachers and sextons, called the Dahlhoff-Sammlung<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sammlung<\/em> (collection) comprises ten notebooks of social dance music written down between 1767 and 1799 in by the Dahlhoff Family<\/strong>, who were organists and sextons in the town of Dinker in the current state of Nordrhein-Westfalen<\/em>. Stefan provided a link to a digitized copy of the notebooks<\/a> accessible online at the Berlin State Library. In addition, he gave me a link to the late Richmud Rollenbeck<\/strong>\u2019s website, which features her modern transcriptions of the entire set of the Dahlhoff Tanzsammlung<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div> I dug in immediately and already have played through many of the tunes the Dahlhoffs<\/strong> wrote down two-and-a-half centuries ago. No immediate parallels with American old-time tunes have yet jumped out. But there are a lot of interesting melodies, with both familiar turns and surprising twists. They are clearly tunes for dancing. Minuets predominate. From my exposure to Finnish dance tunes, I happily learned that minuets were not simply a cultural possession of the elite, but were danced also by the common folk. Many other dance forms are also represented. Stefan<\/strong> shared his favorite. <\/p>\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n