Fiddlin’ Under the Stars
Texas Living People & Places
Southern Living Magazine “Bonus Section”
Lanny Fiel & the Ranch Dance Fiddle Band plays historic music from the days of cowboy and ranch dances in the Texas Panhandle and the Llano Estacado. Performing traditional fiddle tunes of two-steps, waltzes, schottisches, polkas, and specialty numbers,
Teenage musicians in the Panhandle make memories dance to old West Texas tunes.
It’s nearly l a.m. on a warm fall night in Lubbock. Members of the Ranch Dance Fiddle Band, an II-member group of teenagers and a few adults, are relaxing in the living room of band leader Lanny Fiel.
They’ve just performed for a dance in the courtyard at Lubbock’s National Ranching Heritage Center, playing under the same prairie stars as did the old fiddlers at ranch dances of long ago. These youngsters of middle and high school age love old music and scorn much of the new. As they chat, Eminem, in particular, is taking it on the chin amid hoots of laughter.
“Well, I like to listen to Eminem,” Emily Mason, 14, says timidly.
“Emily is going to teach Eminem the schottische,” Lanny, 53, quips, as the group joins him in good-natured laughter.
Kristi Thetford, 18, pipes up: “Today, you have all these remakes of Bob Wills music. Why? It’s good music, obviously. Years from now, no one will be listening to Eminem,” she says to nods of approval.
Likely, Eminem will never listen to them. Although most of its members were born in the ’80s, the band plays West Texas fiddle music that brightened a prairie night for work-weary cowboys and ranch wives. On long-ago Saturdays, ranch hands built a platform on the prairie and danced to a fiddler sawing out old tunes.(Read more)
WestTexas fiddle music dates back at least two centuries, migrating from Europe through the Southeast and Mexico. It blends Celtic strings, Dixieland jazz, African American blues, German polka, and Mexican mariachi. That music, Lanny says, was later urbanized, slickly packaged, and sold to the mass market. Now his youngsters strip these old tunes of their city ways and play them again under the same bright stars.
On the Road
With a I00-song repertoire, the group travels the Panhandle and other parts of Texas, sandwiching 80 performances a year between homework and classes. They play at schools, in festivals, and for convention groups-wherever alcohol is not served. They appear often at the dance platform in Lipscomb, a structure built like those for ranch dances.
They often sing for their supper.
“The motto of our band is ‘If you pay us to play, we’ll eat for free,’ ” quips Kalli Harbin, 18.
Audiences hear fiddle tunes such as “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” and “Prettiest Girl in the County.” They two-step to “Darling Nellie Gray” and waltz to “La Golindrina.” In school settings, the young musicians teach their peers about this music and show them steps to old dances such as the schottische (an old round dance).
Lanny had to learn this music too.
A Lubbock native, he grew up listening to Buddy Holly instead of Bob Wills, played in a rock ‘n’ roll band, and worked as a studio guitarist in Nashville, where he began listening to old-time musicians.
above: Lanny Fiel (kneeling) formed the Ranch Dance Fiddle Band with young violinists-turned-fiddlers. top: Boots shuffle across the courtyard stage in the old dances of schottische, two-step, and waltz.
Returning to Lubbock, he performed in the symphony and gave violin lessons. He also hosted a radio program, Roots Music, and traveled the Panhandle to tape old-time ranch dance fiddlers such as Joe Stephenson and Frankie McWhorter, a former member of Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys. Lanny became a modern day “song catcher” like those who traipsed the Appalachians, Ozarks, and Texas forests and plains in the early 1900s, recording on scratchy cylinders some of the same ballads this band performs.
Learning Violin and Fiddle
Somehow, even before they knew a note of it, that old music had seeped into the souls of these teenagers.
While teaching them violin, Lanny would saw out a fiddle tune or two and soon noticed his pupils had more fun playing “Flop-Eared Mule” than “Blue Danube.”
“I love Mozart. I love Beethoven.
But that’s music from somewhere else,” Lanny says. “Old fiddle music is from our home, and I thought, ‘Th.is is what we should play. We’ll have a fiddle band but really work at it.'”
While urging them to continue orchestral studies, too, Lanny founded his band in 1995 and set high standards. He nudges members such as twins Tracy and Stacy Bohn, 20, far beyond their perceived musical capabilities. “Lanny told us, Tm going to make you do things that are just a little hard for you. I’ll keep pushing you, and you ‘II keep adding another level,'” Tracy comments.
He has instilled in them something else. “You can teach someone music, but you can’t teach them to love it. You have to have a special gift to do that, and Lanny has it,” Kristi remarks. “When we girls get together, we’re not talking about school, hair, and boys. We’re talking about the music and this band.”
Right now, eyelids droop lower and lower. “I think we’re losing Emily,” Lanny remarks, as she nods off from the late hour and the burden this young band shoulders. They are saving sound itself, playing the music until the next young fiddlers carry its beat far into future prairie nights. Right now, however, these young song catchers need to be in bed. They can put away their fiddles for a while and let the old cowboys dance among the stars.
GARY D. FORD
