Beth Rotto: Transcript

Old-time Scandinavian fiddler
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I'm Beth Rotto, and I live in Winneshiek County outside of Decorah, Iowa. I am a mother, and I am a wife, and I work at Oneota [food] Co-op as an assistant manager, I'd call it. And I also play the fiddle with a band called Foot-Notes.

Foot-Notes got started a little over ten years ago. My husband and I had been playing different, different instruments, but we had started to focus on more of the Norwegian American music from this community. We thought of having a band, and we asked Bill Musser if he’d like to play bass. He was a good bass singer, but we didn't know any bass players. And he borrowed a bass from Luther College where he worked. And Jim Skurdall was visiting Decorah. He was camping in Decorah and met some people we know that were having a party. He brought a mandolin along, and he ended up moving here. And so I guess that night was kind of the start of Foot-Notes.

I think I wanted to start Foot-Notes, start a band, because I was a dancer and had been enjoying music by a fiddler named Bill Sherburne. And he kept talking about, you know, this was going to be his last season, he wasn't going to be playing anymore. And I was worried about that, because that was something that a lot of people really enjoyed. And I knew I would miss it, and I ended up studying with Bill for the last few years of his life. (Music)

I think playing waltz, polka, schottische—that's what I call old time music—and I think the Norwegian part of it, at least the Norwegian Americans that play around here, never played really for show so much. A few of them played for fiddle contests “cause that was popular. But they mostly played for dancing, so things are really a danceable tempo, and they are easy to learn.

I live 13 miles outside of Decorah in a rural community, and really felt the newcomer, kind of, in my neighborhood. Even now, I've lived here for over 20 years. But when I started playing this music, then people would say, "Oh, my grandpa used to play that." Or, you know, "We had house parties, and we would play over here in this kitchen or over here in this barnyard." And I started really feeling connected with my neighborhood a lot more than I had before in my community, that way, with some of the people who had had roots for a long time here. (Music)

In my own shorthand, I've got a collection of music that I learned from Bill Sherburne. And I tried to write notes on where he said he remembered hearing the tunes or where he played them. He wasn't real strong in that department, but I've tried to fill in as more information comes on the pieces I learned from him. And then, several people have given me collections of things, handwritten.

My dear friend, Ellen Blagen, was accompanist to her father who was a fiddler. She had a tune book that she kept for herself, as accompanist, that just included the first few lines of the melody. And we constructed, we reconstructed a tune book from her memory of what those tunes were and what the chords were. And then there've been some other collectors over the years. Most of the tunes, as far as I know, aren't being played in some of these collections, and I'd like to get them back out into circulation.