If you play traditional music in Maine or New England, you probably know who Ellen Gawler is. She and her husband, John, have been mainstays of the Maine trad music scene for decades! Here’s another one of my “email interviews.” I’ll ask some questions, Ellen will answer, with the intent being to dig just a little deeper than info might find online. Here we go…..

Bill: Hi Ellen. I know you have been involved with Maine Fiddle Camp (where I see you every year) since the beginning and I know you have been a part of the Maine traditional music and dance scene since way before that.

First of all, let’s get some background. I think you grew up in Vermont. Tell us about the time when you were young. Were you exposed to music early on? How about traditional music..

Ellen: I grew up in a musical family. My mom was a public school music teacher, and my dad, a brilliant singer. I took violin from age seven to about twelve, which gave me a really good foundation. Also, when I was young I grew listening to the music of the MacArthur family our good friends who lived just down the road, in Marlboro Vermont. Margaret MacArthur was a collector and singer of Vermont folk songs, (she later became recognized by the Library of Congress as a National Treasure.) Here’s a video of Margaret playing: 

When we were around eight, Margaret used to send her daughter, my good friend, Megan over to my house with her fiddle under her arm and say “go play with Ellen! “ Our families were very tangled up together, my brother and sister along with all those MacArthur boys were the haying crew for the local dairy farmer, we built post and beam houses together, galloped around the dirt roads on horseback, and got into plenty of mischief! Upon occasion, the family used to invite me to join them for musical gigs. They were my earliest, most influential, introduction to traditional music.
When I was about twelve, Margaret brought the Boys of the Lough over to the states for the first time back in 1970, They did a concert at the West Village Meeting House in West Brattleboro. After the concert, I clearly remember hearing Ali Bain, the fiddler, play the tune, The Gravel Walks, which had a huge impact on me. (Little did I know that I’d be apprenticing with his teacher in Shetland one day!) At that concert, my mother bought me a little book of Irish fiddle tunes by Jack Perron, Rodney and Randy Miller.

I think I learned every tune in that book!

When I was in my pre-teens, my family used to organize square dances at our church with a caller, who would sing the calls out to records. We got pretty good at the dance moves at those dances. However, when I was about fourteen, I remember seeing a poster in Brattleboro for something called a “contra dance” in Putney, Vermont. My sister and I thought we’d go check it out. I remember, to this day, the moment I stepped into that hall. Dudley was calling. The hall was filled with beautiful, young, barefooted, graceful dancers! I was hit by a wave of magic! That moment changed me forever! I spent my high school years pounding the roads of southern Vermont, NH and western Mass, in my little old Saab, a contra dance junkie, dancing and playing for dances as much as humanly possible. Then when I was seventeen, I teamed up with Jeremy Coleman (Flute) And Teddi Scoby (Piano) and we started our own little contra dance in the upstairs of the Marlboro fire station. I don’t think that dance lasted very long, but it was the beginning of a lifelong impulse to start dances!

Bill: At some point you landed in Maine. Tell us a little about that journey and how you got involved with the local music scene.

Ellen: When I was newly out of high school I took my fiddle underarm and traveled in Ireland and the British isles for a few months and played in the pubs. When I got home, I had no job so I moved to Boston and joined an Irish band and made my living busking in the street. I also joined the “Muddy River Morris Team.” That spring we had a tour in Maine with a team called “Strong Morris.” On this team was a familiar cast of characters, Greg Boardman, Doug and Elaine Protsik (now Malkin) Smokey McKeen, Bob Childs, John and sister Sue Gawler, among others. We danced in towns all up and down the beautiful Maine coast. After the dancing, I remember singing all those old “Copper Family” songs in the pubs and feeling like I found my tribe.
It was on that tour that I caught wind of this little festival called the ‘Buttermilk Hill Old Time Music Show’ at the Gawler family farm, in Belgrade. I was all set to go to college in the fall, but Bob Childs invited me to be part of a touring band called the “Old Grey Goose”. How could I refuse? In the band we had Bob Childs, Jeff (Smokey) McKeen, Maggie Ericson, John Gawler, and myself. On that tour was when John and I fell in love. When we returned from the tour, I just stayed in Maine and the rest is history!

Bill: Tell us more about “Buttermilk Hill.” I remember going to the festival years ago but don’t know much about its origins.

Ellen: “Buttermilk Hill” was started by John and his two sisters Kate and Sue about seven years before I came on the scene. It was the name of the farm owned by John’s parents in Belgrade, (Maine). There was a big red barn with a sprawling field behind it that typically hosted a crowd of about 400. A stage was built and the old manure run was used for the food vending windows. Over time, our kids and all their cousins had a great upbringing helping run the festival. We billed it as “good homestyle fun” featuring all our musical friends interspersed with groups from away. We always had “Yodeling Slim Clark,” and also folks like “Fiddling Timmy Farrell,” “Michael Cooney, “Rushad Eggleston,” “Aiofe O’Donovan,” “Trillium,” ” the Northern Valley Boys,” “The Don Roy Trio” and the “Maine French Fiddlers,” to name a few. We also always included a vaudevillian element with artists “Jud the Jester,” “Benny and Denise Reehl and the Buckfield Leather and Lather Co.,” the fabulous “Fred Garbo,” clown and mime “Rick and Jackie Davis” or the dancing, singing duo, “Jones and Boyce,” We had a glorious 25 year run with many great memories.

 

Bill: Tell us about the Maine Country Dance Orchestra? How did it get started?

Ellen: The Maine Country Dance Orchestra played at the Bowdoinham Town Hall on first Saturday of the month for 25 years and all that time, I think we missed only one dance. The dances started at 8:00 and went ’till midnight, and sometimes beyond if we were having too much fun to stop! The orchestra was made up of three bands; The The Old Grey Goose, and The members of these bands were all good friends and wanted to play together on a regular basis. And so, the Orchestra was born. The ‘big band’ configuration gave the musicians the ability to take turns with the calling while occasionally taking a spin on the dance floor. Greg Boardman, Chris Prickett, and (the late) Dave Livingston were in the “>Bob Childs, Ellen (Thomas) Gawler, and Jeff (Smokey) McKeen, were in the Old Grey Goose. Doug Protsik, Elaine Malkin (Protsik) and John Gawler were in the Pine Hill String Band. Later, Carter and Kaity Newell joined too. Eventually, many of us had kids that would come along, and as the night would wear on, they bedded down in sleeping bags behind the thumping piano.

 

We always believed in allowing “sit-ins” for people who were interested in playing along with the band. Also, we believed in no microphones which made it possible for us to spontaneously jump around on stage or out onto the floor. Sometime we would launch into a Beatles song like ‘All you need is love’ or devolve into some other cacophany for eight bars and then back into the tune, to the delight of his dancers! The MCDO was the originator of the goofy “fall down ending” (famously captured in a National Geographic Magazine Article) where the band collapses to the floor and sticks their feet into the air on the last note. Needless to say, we had a pile of fun.
Bill: And how about Maine Fiddle Camp? I know you were involved from the start. Tell us about the beginning of Camp and maybe compare the early Camps to nowadays.

FIRST FIDDLE CAMP 1994

Ellen: Before Fiddle Camp, the fiddling gang, Greg, Bob, Doug, Elaine, Carter, Kaity, me and others used to meet at all the many little fiddle contests interspersed around the state. In the beginning it was great fun because all the old guys, Lucien Matieu, Ben Guillemette, Eddie Deschenes and others would come. But over time it was just us, once again competing with each other. It was Greg who had the foresight. Now that we have kids, is this really what we want for them? Competition? Let’s create a camp so we can all be together and have fun in a non-competitive way. Together, with hearing stories from Lissa Schneckenburger who just returned from the Alasdair Fraser’s camp in California called “Valley of the Moon,” these were Greg’s original inspirations for starting Maine Fiddle Camp.

For the first five or six years, the camp was just one weekend in June and everything happened in the little dining hall. The food wasn’t very good, but we were content with a few days together and being sort of small, with no idea of the great potential around the bend! It wasn’t till Doug came along with his creative thinking and “can do” attitude that it has grown into the wonder that it is today.

Bill: Tell us about teaching “year-round” and various groups like the Pineland Fiddlers, etc.
Ellen: When our first daughter Molly was three, I heard about the Suzuki Method and how great it was for starting kids at a really young age. So Molly and I took lessons together with a fabulous teacher named Kathy Wood in Bangor, with a little lesson for Molly and a teacher training session for me. This began a seven year teacher training journey for me. I remember, Kaity Newell was on a parallel track with her first child, Maisie. This evolved into our two families being “all in” on the Suzuki Method but definitely coming to the experience as fiddlers. The way this played out both of us was, we have had a lifetime of recognizing the useful skills that are hiding in fiddle tunes and use the tunes to build up the skills one needs to be a really good fiddler. It’s about so much more than just learning the tunes. The Suzuki method has given us a rich collection of tools to use to help apply good techniques in fiddling.

After teaching for about five years by myself in Belgrade, Betsy Kobayashi, who was newly home from studying with Dr. Suzuki in Japan, fell out of the sky into Central Maine. It was Kaity who called me to tell me about her! It wasn’t long before Betsy and I joined forces and co-founded the Pineland Suzuki School, now twenty-five years running. The Pineland Fiddlers has always been a healthy group of youngsters taking part in an elective that’s offered to anyone in the program. Although the kids in the group may have different primary teachers, because they are Suzuki kids, they have certain abilities in common making it possible to move forward as a cohesive group. For over two decades now, we have been playing for concerts, dances, festivals and fairs and have traveled to Quebec and Cape Breton on 2 occasions, as well as PEI, Ireland, Shetland and Turkmenistan, and have 3 CD’s to our name. It’s been such a great honor to work with all these great kids and watch them grow into wonderful fiddlers! Many have settled close by, and are pursuing musical endeavors, taking their place in the living tradition that is alive and well here in Maine!

Bill: It seems like the Gawler Family Band is showing up everywhere these days. Even as the kids have grown up and flown the coop you all keep it together even adding “family members.” Tell us what’s cooking for the family band.

The above video is produced by Bagaduce Music and is over an hour long. It’s a great listen!!

Ellen: Oh my gosh yes! It’s the music what’s attracting ‘um Bill! Somehow, we’ve grown from our “gigs” at the library, sitting on those wee chairs, singing the water is wide in three part harmony, to today with seven members and growing. John and I feel so fortunate that our three girls: Molly, Edith and Elsie, with Bennett, Ethan, and sometimes Zeb all love playing together so much and they don’t mind playing with mom and dad too! It’s hard to imagine a life where we don’t have gigs sprinkled here and there. And always, by some miracle, it’s been just the right amount of activity to be fulfilling and not overwhelming. We feel so honored to be the purveyors of the tradition, and to show up for celebrations, memorials, fairs and festivals, concerts and dances, our lives so enriched and touched by the people we meet.  We are so grateful to be able to share our music and to have it so warmly received!

Bill: Finally, what do you do when you’re NOT playing music?
Ellen: Well, in the summer, (when I’m not at Fiddle Camp) I usually spend every spare minute in the garden growing veggies! And now, with four grandchildren, there’s time spent with them plus lots of knitting of little sweaters and hats…. And I DO love to cook, or rather I love to feed people……
Thanks Ellen! -bill