Pa's Fiddle Recordings is an effort to pay some small musical tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) for her efforts to illuminate, explain, and capture the place that music-making once occupied in the family life of ordinary Americans. Her famous series of eight Little House® books traces her own family’s history, with settings in Wisconsin, Kansas (Indian territory), Minnesota, and South Dakota (Dakota Territory) that cover a period from 1867 to 1885. The books have rightly become cornerstone classics in American children’s literature, read by millions the world over."1

Embedded in Wilder’s stories are references to 126 separate songs and tunes. By the Shores of Silver Lake alone contains mention of 37 songs. These Happy Golden Years is titled after a song, and six of the books close with music-making. Furthermore, the types of music Wilder employed are extensive. The Little House® books embrace parlor songs, stage songs, minstrel show songs, patriotic songs, Scottish and Irish songs, hymns, spirituals, fiddle tunes, singing school songs, play party songs, folk songs, a Child ballad, broadside ballads, Christmas songs, catches and rounds, cowboy songs, and make reference to “Osage war dances.”

Throughout, the guiding musical spirit is Laura’s father, Charles “Pa” Ingalls (1835-1902), who missed few opportunities to sing and play his fiddle. And it’s “Pa’s fiddle,” carefully wrapped, stowed in its fiddle-box, and cushioned by pillows, that accompanies the Ingalls family through all its adventures and comes to symbolize the endurance of the family unit in an often wild and threatening frontier world. Indeed, Wilder wrote to her publisher that “(t)here is one thing that will always remain the same to remind people of little Laura’s days on the prairie, and that is Pa’s fiddle.”2

There may be no books in American literature of comparable standing and popularity where America’s music is so central to the themes, assumes such a major narrative role, and is found in such rich abundance. If Laura Ingalls Wilder penned what have become the books that best express “The Great American Family,” then the music she referred to in those books has become an important part of that mythology too. These recordings are an effort to give new voice and sound to music that has lain silent on the page for far too long. For as Wilder herself wrote, “if you want the spirit of these times, you should [hear] these old songs."3

Dale Cockrell
Professor of Musicology and
American and Southern Studies
Vanderbilt University

² Letter to Harper & Row, Collections of the Laura Ingalls Wilder-Rose Wilder Lane Home and Museum, Mansfield, Missouri. Pa’s fiddle is still extant and on display at this same museum.

³ Quoted in the unpublished “Pioneer Girl” manuscript, Wilder Papers, State Historical Society of Missouri (microfilm). My thanks to Nancy Cleaveland for directing me to this source.