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Fiddling Way Out Yonder: The Life and Music of Melvin Wine.

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Fiddling Way Out Yonder: The Life and Music of Melvin Wine. By Drew Beisswenger. (American Made Music Series.) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. [xvi, 230 p. ISBN 1-57806-441-4. $40.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Melvin Wine was born in 1909 and spent most of his life in north-central West Virginia. Descended from eighteenth-century German immigrants, he learned to play the fiddle from his father, who in turn had learned from the playing of his grandfather and the singing of his own father, Melvin's grandfather. Melvin lived to the age of ninety-three and reportedly continued to play until his death early in 2003, shortly after the publication of this book. This is not the first treatment of his life and fiddling in a published work: in Gerald Milnes's book on the West Virginia fiddling tradition, Play of a Fiddle: Traditional Music, Dance, and Folklore in West Virginia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), Wine is included as just one of a remarkable number of musicians who have brought attention to the fiddling styles of Appalachia in general and West Virginia in particular. Many, such as the Hammons family and the Carpenter brothers, have already been well documented on recordings. Beisswenger, in contrast, has chosen to examine an Appalachian fiddler whose activity remained largely confined to a small locale. The book serves as the musical ethnography of a community rather than a "celebrity" biography such as the books on Fiddlin' John Carson or Bob Wills (Gene Wiggins, Fiddlin Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin John Carson, His Real World, and the World of His Songs [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987] and Charles R. Townsend, San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976]). Melvin Wine, by virtue of his extraordinary longevity, his general lucidity in old age, and his eagerness to communicate with young fiddlers and interviewers alike, was an ideal informant for such an ethnography. If he was not the most representative Appalachian, or even West Virginian, fiddler of his generation at the time of the author's research, he was very possibly the most loved.

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