These are some of the people we have been fortunate enough to learn from. Unfortunately, we didn’t always have a camera, so some wonderful folks are not here.
Elliott Johnson – Tohono O’Odham fiddler
We visited Elliott Johnson on the Tohono O’Odham reservation a number of times in his village of Cobabi. He taught us many of the tunes that he had learned from his family and other tribal musicians. Their music goes back over two hundred years and has had a double fiddle tradition that whole time.
Dennis McGee and Jeanie – 1978
Dennis McGee was born in 1893 in SW Louisiana near Eunice. Ken met him in 1973 and Jeanie met him in 1978. He is a big influence in how we play music. He was a fantastic fiddler and played in an amazingly danceable and archaic style. We spent many hours with Dennis on the back porch or our little house behind Mark and Ann Savoy’s place in Louisiana.
Arturo Marquez and his cousin Cleofes Ortiz
Alphonse ‘Bois Sec’ Ardoin & Canray Fontenot In Mamou
Canray Fontenot
Cleofes Ortiz
Eluterio Martinez – Tierra Amarilla, NM
J.P. Lewis – Dell City, Texas
Pete Lewis – Crow Flat, Texas
Raymond François – Eunice, LA 1978
Teofilo Maestas – Bernalillo, NM
Vincent Aragon – Cuba, NM
‘Tit’ John, Cajun Cowboy – 1978
Pete Lewis – Oct. 2007
This is a picture of Pete with his fiddle in front of his house in Crow Flat, New Mexico. You can see the sign for Howell Lewis selling horses on his lower right. It’s a lovely place out there and a wonderful family. He plays in a style very similar to that of his uncles and grandparents, going back into the 1870’s in New Mexico and earlier in Bandera, Texas. His uncles, Denman and Dempson recorded in El Paso, Texas in 1928. They recorded ‘Bull at the Wagon’, ‘When Springtime Comes Again’, ‘Sally Johnson’, and the quite quirky schottische ‘Calliope’