Interview with Bob Holt

Here are some excerpts from an interview Drew Beisswenger and Liz Amos did with Bob Holt on December 21, 1999. Some great stories...

"Why I was born right out here in the old house; place where it's fell down? That's where I was born, and I've lived here all my life except for about twelve and a half years I live in Iowa."

"My grandfather moved on the adjoining farm here in 1889. My mother's folks moved in the area in 1855. My grandmother could remember the, she was about eleven years old when the Civil War was going on. She could remember the different soldiers, either side, lived at their place.... They hid all their staples, all their goods, you know, that they could carry off. And they had some bee hives. They even hid them in a ditch, and covered them over with brush, piled. Kind of camouflaged it with brush so the bees could get in and out, but you couldn't see it, because the soldiers would take anything they could eat or wear, use, you know, in any way."

"This was the main road if you wanted to come from McClurg to Ava. This was the main road that was traveled, went through Rome and Smallette and all these little small places, which was thriving little communities at that time. Usually there was a doctor at Smallette, there was a doctor at Rome, and blacksmith shops, and, you know, they was just little villages."

"I never remembered a time when I wasn't crazy about music, always. As long as it was going on, I was right there around it, you know.... My uncle played banjo, and he had people played with him, would come play with him, you know, or he'd go play with somebody. My dad never missed any music anywhere. He was always wherever there was some music, and he'd take me along with him. And then my grandma had a huge record collection of the early records, like in the twenties, from the twenties, and there was, she had all kinds of records. There was all the old, like Skillet Lickers stuff, and early recordings of that type of music, and she also had a lot of novelty tunes, funny kind of like vaudeville stuff you know. And also a lot of foxtrots and Charlestons, and just, I had a bunch of older cousins that was girls that hung out at my grandma's all the time. And, of course, the girls danced all these dances, you know, from the flapper era."

"Oh, I can remember medicine shows, for instance. There was a, there was still on some kind of an old truck, you know, an old Model T or something, there would be a traveling medicine show come to town. My dad always found them, anything like that, you know, where there was a little music and some dancing. They usually had some blackfaced dancers, at least one, and somebody that could play something, when they made their pitch and sold their liniment and their cure-all. And I was small enough, I remember my dad would set me up, I'd set straddle of his neck, up on his shoulders so I could see over the crowd." [Drew: Did they have any fiddle players or banjo players with that troupe?] Yeah, sure, yeah."

"My family just wasn't a singing family... [but] my mom used to sing me old ballads and stuff around the house. Like I can remember her singing Barbara Allen and Little Mohee, a lot of the old stuff."

[Drew: Did you ever take an interest in singing yourself?] "Oh, shoot yeah. I thought I was a great singer at one time. I'd go riding a horse or something around, and go in some place, or out doing something by myself, I'd just sing [but not in front of people].... I always was too smart for that. I had too good a ear. I knew, I could imagine all I wanted to, but when it come right down to it, I knew better, you know.... [One time] Bealer asked me for a, about the words for some old song one night, and I happened to know this particular verse, and I sung, kindly, sung them to him. He said, "that's-," he said, "Thank you; I'm glad to get those words, but," he said, "next time you just, just talk them to me." I thought that was kind of a low blow, after me being good enough to give him the words. [More laughing]

[Regarding music] Well, it's been one of the main sources of entertainment and relaxation, if you can, to me, I don't know how you call it relaxation, but it's a different form of heavy labor, anyway, we'll put it that way. And back, back when the transportation was bad, you know, we couldn't go anywhere, people in this country didn't, back in the twenties, the majority of them didn't have cars, they had what, you know, they could ride a horse or drive a wagon or a hack or a buggy or something, and that was about the limit of it. And this was a thing that they could have within a community, where they could get to it, and it didn't cost a whole lot, and it was evidently, there's just nothing any more enjoyable than dancing to people that likes to dance. And I know from my standpoint there's nothing more enjoyable than playing for a dance, and making people dance and helping them enjoy that feeling. I get my feelings from watching them enjoys theirself, you know. And it's just been a, it's played a very very important role. We didn't have radios until I was, I never heard a radio till I was probably five years old, 1935. And just imagine on before that, that they didn't have any. And they could go to a music party, or to a dance, and hear music, get together and visit, and do all that within their means, you know, without spending a lot of money, which they didn't have. And it was a, people was proud of that, they, it was part of their heritage. It had come down, as long as anybody had been around here, they'd been doing that, and they thought it was the thing to do, and loved doing it. A lot of the really hard-nosed church people didn't do it, but if you got to play around where they was at, most of them would pat their feet pretty hard, I've noticed. They all liked it, and they liked hard fast music, driving music. They don't like, for the most part I mean, the slow more intricate hornpipes and things like they play in the north. That doesn't set these people a-fire. They want the hard driving faster-beat music that winds them up, gets their blood to pumping."

[Regarding hearing his first radio] "I had a neighbor lives over the hill, just a mile from here if you go across through the woods, had moved back here from Oklahoma in 1935. And they had a radio. And they'd been telling us about the Grand Ole Opry, you know, Saturday night. So me and my two next brothers, Howard and John, rode our old mule, Old Pete, rode him over the hill to the neighbors to listen at the Grand Ole Opry. I can remember that's the first time I ever heard the radio. It was, I think, it was 1937 before we got one."

"There still wasn't very many guitars, and there wasn't many good guitars. The ones they had was down at the, where it joined on, it'd be three quarters of an inch off of the strings, would be off of the neck, you know. And every time they changed, every time they played in a different key, they'd have to change tuning, because it would only note in about three things at once."

"And then at the fair. Usually always some music at the fairs, live music, somebody playing. I remember the first Hawaiian steel guitar I ever seen, a little bitty single-necked thing a feller held on his lap, and I thought that was really something, you know, that- [Douglas County Fair].... And they always had a dance floor for square dancers, you know. And there's always the fiddle and banjo, and sometimes a guitar playing for that. That went on constantly... at every picnic or anything. That was the main attraction at anything. Every, all these little stores, post office communities, villages I'm talking about, they would sometime during the summer, they would have a picnic, they called them.... [They's have an] annual little picnic. They'd have some ice cream probably, and have lemonade, and something to eat. They'd sell that. A few simply games that they played.... [Dancing] was the big attraction."

"At the county fair, now, they had the bigger rides like the Farris wheels and stuff like that. These picnics didn't have that. Once in a while they had a swing, you know, just a swing with a lot of seats on it. They used to have one up here at Squires that was pulled with a horse. There was one horse moved, pulled in the middle, hooked to thing that had gears on it, and that would operate. There'd maybe be a dozen swings hung on this thing. And you'd get in that swing and this old horse would go around and around, and that of course was geared up to where it would spin that fairly fast, get you out. Wouldn't get you way up, but it would get you out. It was pleasant, I guess. And dad said they always had two brothers would set in those. They'd let them ride free because they played the fiddles. One would play the melody, and one would play rhythm to it.... Now I never heard this myself, but he said that sound would, as they come around in the swing. You could hear it real plain, and then it'd kind of fade when they got over on the other side. Said it was really neat."

"Used to at these county fairs they would have a competition of who was the best set, the best square dance set, and have contests you know. Somewhere I've got a picture, it's in my mom's pictures somewhere if I ver get to looking through them, of that set, that I've threatened to, I wish I had dug out."

[Liz: When did wearing taps become popular?] "Really I never seen much of it until after the jiggers. There was a set on, that was the name of a set on television, on that Ozark Jubilee out of Springfield [in the 1950s], you've heard of it, and they had this set on it, and they used taps, and that's really, made it popular over the country. [Drew: By putting taps on, did it change the dancing a lot?] A little, yeah. They do more heel and toe jigging or clog-type stuff, than they do the shuffle. They used to do more of a flatfoot, more shuffle. My dad was a much smoother shuffler, dancer, than, and he done most of his dancing with the little slides."

[Drew: Now in the dances they have some of those called do-si-does, the mixers, or the couple dances and waltzes. Did they have those when you were young?] "They had similar thing that we used to do, what they called a circle dance, where the ladies and the men line up in separate lines and go in a circle, and when the whistle blows then you get to nearest one to you for a partner. And if it's uneven, why you wind up without a partner sometimes, and then they also make that into what they call a broom dance where you wind up dancing with a broom if you don't get a partner. But, there's always been waltzes, but we just didn't have a lot of people that waltzed, or that wanted to, or that could."

"I've enjoyed the house dances ever since I can remember.... [The helping-each-other-clear-land work parties]... was pretty much over by then. This was just usually a Saturday night dance.... Usually it was in a neighborhood.... There was very few cars, and it was just within about one school district or walking distance or something, you know, two or three mile. You would invite your family, relations, and neighbors. It would be a fairly, most of them was fairly closed dances. I mean, they was private dances, and if they could keep it pretty quiet and not let it get out and let everybody know it, then they had a pretty good time. If they got out, and too many knew about it, and too many drunks showed up, then they'd be a big fight, usually.... Nearly everybody went to town on Saturday. That was about the only time they went was Saturday afternoon, and that's usually when they'd [house dance organizers] get the dances up.... Usually [the dance would be] that night [at dark].... They didn't want the word out very long because if it was out very long, it got around too much."

"[House dances would be] more so in the winter because in the summer they was busy working, and they didn't take off much for anything then. Back then you had to work, you literally had to work just about every day."

"A lot of times there would be a midnight supper. My mom always had one. She always cut a ham, and fried up a big bunch of ham, and eggs and stuff at midnight because she figured if she could get them to eat, you know, they didn't drink too long on an empty stomach, and they didn't get in too bad a shape."

"[My father didn't have dances at his house because] he belonged to the church at that time, him and my mom both.... [He could go to dances but] if he'd have had a dance hisself, at his house, why that would have been a different story."

"[At a certain time of the night the kids would be shuffled back into the bedrooms].... They'd be piled everywhere."

"I could play tunes on a harmonica when I was four years old, playing Casey Jones and a few simple tunes.... One of our brothers had an old taterbug mandolin, you know, around here, and I fooled with that some. And then kind of got to where I thought I could play it when I was probably eight, ten, eleven. And then I ordered one out of Sears, Kay, flattop, and played it for, oh, several years. I first started playing for a group, I played mandolin.... When I first started playing with this group I was married. I was seventeen, eighteen. I was already playing the fiddle too some then, but I didn't play it out.... There was a guy played lead guitar, and his wife played rhythm guitar and sang, and there was another feller that fiddled. Once in a while we'd have a bass player. And then this old Doc Norman was real old at that time, but he would play with us sometimes on Friday night. And then I played the mandolin.... We played at somebody's house ever week, and we played for a lot of pie suppers, and a lot of gatherings, you know.... Didn't play any dances.... [We played] that old stuff and early country stuff.... As far as I know, we never got paid anything.... We played probably four or five years, pretty good music for the time and the area."

[Drew: Your father actually wanted you to play.] "Oh yeah. He'd rather
I'd have been a fiddler as a doctor.""My dad just..., he kept trying to get me to find one [a fiddle]. I wasn't that interested in playing it. I was doing pretty good with the mandolin, I thought, you know, and this was before I, this was when I was about fifteen. And, why, I just never done anything about it. And finally he come home one day and he said, "I run into this Martin Walker up in town," and I knew he usually had some fiddles. He said, "I bought you a fiddle. Now you go over there and get it." So me and my buddy went over there and got it. Got stuck while we was in there; had a hell of a time getting out. I remember that. Had to put chains on. It was rainy and muddy. And I just brought it home and started playing it."

[Drew: Did you have other fiddlers show you?] No, I didn't have anybody to show me. [Liz: Well you learned some tunes from your dad.] But he was whistling; he wasn't showing me on the fiddle.... I had played the mandolin, and I pretty well knew where the notes was, see. But I've fought the bow all these years, and I'm still fighting it."

"I never played in that many bands. I played with, when I was in Iowa, I played in a Country-Western band with Harley [Newberry], and that's really about all.... I knew them down here, but not well, not real well. In fact, I don't know if I even knew Harley or not. I knew his wife before he ever dated her or anything. When we was kids I knew who she was. But I don't think I had really met him till I got up there [to Iowa] because he had been in California, his folk had been, for quite a while. I just, a neighbor, a fellow that I lived close by, knew Harley and went to school with him, and knew where he lived, and knew he had a band and everything. And told me about him, and he told Harley about me. And he invited me over one Saturday, and I went over, and we played that afternoon, and he had a gig to play that night. He said, "Why don't you go with us?" So I went. I just started playing with them. He said, "Why don't you just start playing with us?" [That was in 1956]

[Drew: What percentage of the tunes you learned were tunes that were played around here from, by other fiddlers, and which would you say are learned from the 78s?] "Oh God, that'd be, that would hard because a lot of the tunes I learned from fiddlers around here they had learned from early recordings also. And now I have no way of knowing, you know, which ones was which, which ones they had learned from old 78s and which ones they had learned from the older fiddlers. But they was all, these tunes was common. I mean, everybody that played the fiddle very much, that play-, some of them didn't play over one or two tunes. A lot of fiddlers just played one or two tunes, mostly. But really, the fiddlers that played any amount of tunes, there was a good part of them from, that was just passed down, you know. And the ones I learned from my dad's whistling, a lot of them was just passed down.... I know the tunes, but he didn't know the names of them, of most of them. Now I could, The Little Dutch Girl was one that I always heard him whistling, Wolves A-Howling, Hop Up Kittypus, and the one I call Flop Old Turkey Buzzard, oh just any number, most of those older standard tunes, old fiddle tunes, The Eighth of January and all those common tunes.""They [Harold and John] was two as good a square dancers as ever come out of this part of the country, or anywhere else. They was great dancers, and liked better than nearly anybody. John used to work, for a period of time he work in Witchita, and they was having a good dances up at Ava every, I don't remember if it was every Saturday night or every two weeks or something like that, and he would drive from Witchita, Kansas, after work on, what, and be in Ava in time for the dance. I don't know what is it, five hours? Three and a half or four? I don't know, it's a long hard drive."

[In Iowa] "Oh, I done just about everything. I worked in a lot of different machine shops, and quarries. And, the main, longest job I had was a cabinet-maker. And then I become a barber, went to barber school, and I had my own barber shop... [for}] five years.... I never liked to work for anybody. I was always too independent to want to work for anybody. I thought if I could get to, you know, barber, I would be working for myself. But I found that I was working for the public then. And that was worse yet than working for a single boss, as everybody was your boss."

[Regarding square dancing and fiddle music] It was tapering off in the fifties; let me put it that way. And then you got to remember these people was getting older, the ones that really was into it, and the younger people up in the fifties, late fifties and sixties, got into a whole new field of music. And there was very little dancing going on in this country when I started, when me and Edna Mae started working on this and getting these dances going.... in the seventies. There was the annual dances like Hootin' and Hollerin', and there was usually one or two in Ava a year, and that was about it. And I've built these others pretty much since then, not by myself, understand, I mean, I've had a lot of help.... Edna Mae's played a big role in it. Gordon McCann played a big role in it, in getting us acquainted with the people at, from cultural heritage, from the Missouri Arts Council, and so forth."

"Lonnie [Robertson] would, he'd be the first to tell you that he wasn't a square dance fiddler. And that's why most of the fiddlers wonder, I've had them ask me, "Are you comfortable with being called a square dance fiddler?" I say, "Yeah, that's when I'm the most comfortable because I can believe that, you know." And I've been told that so much that I kind of think I must be. And I think it's great. That's what I wanted to be. To me, it's, if you can't make people dance, what's the point. I mean, I like pretty music for a while, but it gets boring after a while."

[Regarding his general distaste for fiddle competitions] I actually entered one contest at the Douglas County Fair, when I first come back here, when I first move back here from Iowa, and I won the contest, and I felt like there was two other good fiddlers in the contest. And I actually felt like they was both better than I was. I didn't feel like the, I felt like I win it because the judges happened to know me and like me better, you know, or something. And right then I decided that contests wasn't the way to go. I didn't want, I didn't turn down the money [laughs], I think it was twenty-five dollars, but I never wanted to play another contest, and I never have."

Drew Beisswenger
Springfield, MO