Wild West Fiddle Project unearths the multicultural sounds of pre-statehood Arizona

LAUREN GILGER: Let’s hear a little fiddle music, Arizona fiddle music, in fact.

Our next guest this morning uncovered our state’s rich musical heritage and found out what it might have sounded like if you went to a country dance in pre-statehood Arizona.

Kate Rose and guitarist Armand Ramirez are the duo that make up the Wild West Fiddle Project. They’re speakers with Arizona Humanities’ AZ Speaks, where they give presentations about how music traditions were connected to landscapes — from Native cultures to the Spanish, who were here for centuries.

They joined me in our studios to talk more about it all and listen to a little fiddle.

KATE ROSE: So, when I was a teenager back in the 1990s, I went to Ireland for two years, to County Clare, and I lived the traditional lifestyle with the fiddling farmers in order to understand the rhythms of the music and the stories and customs that went into the music, and the dances as well.

GILGER: As a high schooler?

KATE ROSE: I graduated from high school when I was 16, and then I was on my own, and I ended up in Ireland.

GILGER: My goodness. What drew you there? Were you already a musician? Did you already play the fiddle?

ROSE: Yeah. So, I started playing in my early teens and as soon as I started, I just knew that that’s what I wanted to do. I grew up in New Hampshire, and there was a lot of contra dance music and Irish music. We still play for contra dances now, too.

GILGER: Explain contra dance for us, because I’m not sure everyone knows what that is. Can you tell us what that means?

ROSE: Sure. So, contra dance originated in New England. It was already a fusion tradition — music from French, Quebec and from Ireland, and all different places coming together and making a new dance form.

And we decided to figure out what was going on in Arizona at the same time, what kind of dances were people doing there? And so we started looking in the old archives and talking with culture bearers, and there wasn’t a lot out there. We really had to dig deep to find what was going on.

Then we found a real wealth of material and dances that we’re bringing to life that has some similarities with contra dance, but also has a really specific Arizona flavor to it.

GILGER: So yeah, let’s talk about that. You’ve called what you do in your performances "Arizona’s hidden soundscape," right? This this kind of history of, it sounds like, unique blends of folk music that arrived in Arizona. What era are we looking at?

ROSE: Right. So, we mostly work with the mid- to late 1800s. We talk about how the landscape influences music, and then how the different Native groups had their music that was connected to the landscape and the creatures and the objects that they made music from.

And then the Spanish were here for centuries and brought their influence from medieval Spain into the music. And then, in the 1800s, we get everyone else coming, all these influences from the Irish and Appalachian people, African Americans, just everyone coming.

So that’s kind of the focus that we have is on that period where everyone’s coming and it’s this huge cultural melting pot of sounds.

GILGER: And the music, all of those traditions ended up kind of in one place, in one song sometimes?

ROSE: Yeah, sometimes.

GILGER: Can you play one for us?

ROSE: Yeah. So, this is by Kenner Kartchner, a frontier fiddler born 100 years before me. He was born in 1876, and he lived in Flagstaff for a while, where we live, and this is his tune called “Johnny Blevin’s Tune.”

GILGER: OK, let’s hear it.

GILGER: I love that.

ROSE: It’s very cheerful music.

GILGER: Definitely, definitely. OK, so is that kind of what it might have sounded like at a town dance maybe in Arizona 100 years ago?

ROSE: Yes! And they were real dancers and party people. In northern Arizona, they would have parties all night, and they’d play, and at midnight someone would cook up a big feast and bring it to the square, and they would eat, and then they’d keep dancing until the sun came up.

GILGER: What?

ROSE: And there was a lot of interaction between the different communities, like the Kenner Kartchner, we just played his tune. He was hired by Mexican ranching communities for their weddings and fiestas, and he played with a Mexican guitarist. So, he already had that blend of Celtic influence tunes and then the accompaniment with a more Mexican sound.

So, we’re trying to recreate that, too, with our backgrounds in Celtic and Hispanic traditions respectively.

GILGER: That’s so Arizona, right?

ROSE: Yeah, exactly.

GILGER: So you did, as you said, like research on this, and it was not easy to dig up. Talk about what you found in the archives, where you had to look.

ROSE: Right. So, we got a fellowship from the Arizona Historical Society to spend a week in Tucson. So, we went to University of Arizona’s special collections, and there’s a bunch of sound recordings by Jim Griffith. So, we listened to those — and they’re not publicly available — that, again, have that really clear Hispanic influence, but also something really distinctively Arizona that represents these mixing of traditions, like a lot of Eastern European influences, such as polkas and mazurkas.

Then we went to the Tohono O’odham Reservation and we met with Gertie Lopez, who is called the queen of waila. Waila is a fusion genre that mixes the Native traditions with these European traditions, and it’s just been going on for centuries. And she generously shared some of her music. We’re going down to play with her again soon.

GILGER: That’s amazing. Talk about the dances back then. You talked about how they’re a bit of a party, it was a little crazy. But, I mean, it sounds like there were some interesting dance traditions, too, that went along with this music.

ROSE: There definitely were, and we have a lot of fun. We talk about them, and we bring them to life again with wild steps. We go to libraries and schools and nursing homes, everywhere we can, bring these alive again, talk about them, get people to do them.

So some of the traditions that we really like, there’s one called the finger polka — where you shake your finger at your partner and then stomp your feet. And shake and stomp. And then we adapt it, we have the B part where everyone high-fives each other, and then the C part where they swing. So, we’re taking an element from a traditional dance.

There’s another one where the ladies take off one shoe and they put them all in the middle, so there’s a big pile of shoes, and the guy picks a shoe and then he has to find, that’s his dance partner.

GILGER: So, I mean, I guess I just want to end with a question about maybe a surprising discovery in all of this research, maybe something you just really love that you always love to share with folks.

ROSE: Yeah, we found an old clipping from the Tombstone newspaper from the late-1800s, and it said that the Irish mix indiscriminately with other populations.

GILGER: I guess you can hear that in the music, too.

ROSE: So, I’m proud of that as an Irish person. You certainly can hear that in the music, and that’s certainly what we’re trying to do with the Wild West Fiddle Project. We’re working with musicians across traditions that have some cultural rootedness in Arizona.

I think it’s really important to recognize that it was always a multicultural melting pot. And back in the 1800s, there weren’t as many people in Arizona, so they couldn’t just stick with their communities. If you wanted to hear a different kind of music, you needed people from different communities coming in, and there was a lot more interdependence.

We want to bring that message to people so that we can reach out beyond our usual communities today, and that’s what we’re doing through the dances and music: We’re bringing people together across different backgrounds.

GILGER: Yeah. All right, we’ll leave it there. That is Kate Rose and Armand Ramirez with the Wild West Fiddle Project, presented by Wild Steps. Kate, Armand, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you for playing for us.

ARMAND RAMIREZ: Thank you.

ROSE: Thanks.