“I just got to playing by sort of an accident, I guess ”

____Mellie, newspaper interview, December 1925

The Boston newspaper reporter who asked Mellie how he started fiddling had a good ear for dialect: “Feller lived next to me had a fiddle. And I kind of liked the sound of it. Tried it out and then got me a fiddle. Pretty poor fiddle it was. Had it five years and got me a better one. Had that one about 25 years and then got me this one. It’s a pretty good fiddle; isn’t worth a whole lot, I guess, but it plays good, it does, and I won the championship on it.”

Mellie, 1925, postcard by Vivian Akers

The story has it that a local man named Abner Jackson sold the 13-year-old Mellie a fiddle, in pieces, with assurances that it would sound good if repaired. Mellie fixed it, and picked up some basics from Horace Dinsmore, the “feller lived next to me.” After seeing a photo of Classical violinist Ole Bull Mellie adopted a playing position modeled on the Classical position, left arm out, fiddle held high under the chin. He played by ear: “Can pick out a note from music, about one note in five minutes, but can’t read to play at all,” he told the Boston reporter.

Mellie’s fiddles have names, and sometimes stories. The fiddle he refers to in the interview is the Joe Pike fiddle, found by a local man called Uncle Joe Pike in the attic of a grist mill. Joe traded some flour for the fiddle, and played it until his death, when it got put away in an attic in the Millettville neighborhood, up the road from Mellie’s home. Mellie found it, with an F hole gnawed by mice, and took it to Lewiston, to Nathan Taylor, one of the best of a large number of Maine violin makers active before and after 1900. Taylor did a professional repair job on it, but the mouse damage remains visible in photographs of Mellie with the fiddle, right in the middle of the F hole on the bass side of the instrument.

In 1925 Mellie wrote to Henry Ford: “I am 72 years old - have played for dances 55 years. Cannot play jazz nor in the position [that is, above first position] on the violin. Am not a violinist just an ‘Old Time Fiddler’”. If Mellie’s account is accurate, he would have started playing as a teenager, and started playing for dances about the time of his marriage, 1875. With travel restricted to horse-and-buggy distance for an evening out, these dances were neighborhood and community affairs for the most part, frequent but not large. People who were willing to travel a bit, say ten miles or so to surrounding towns, could dance every night of the week if they wanted to. A corollary of this situation was that there were plenty of opportunities for musicians, and a continuing supply of players, especially fiddlers, to fill these needs.

Mellie’s father died at the end of 1885, and Mellie’s mother Mary Denison Dunham in the spring of 1889. By that time Mellie and Emma had a daughter, Ethna Pearl, born in the summer of 1878. Pearl married Nathan Noble in 1897; by 1905 the couple had four children. Nathan, learned snowshoe making from Mellie, became part of the family business, and eventually opened his own snowshoe and woodworking shop in Norway.

In the fall of 1903 some neighborhood ladies formed an organization: “for charity and sociability”. Such organizations often had a literary side to them as well, so it was the Benevolent Literary Club, then in 1904 the Ladies Heywood Club, after John Heywood, the pre-Shakespearean English author of plays and poetry, then included on most college reading lists. Emma Dunham was a charter member, so when a clubhouse was built in 1907 just up the road from the Dunham farm, it was natural for Mellie to begin fiddling for the dances the club held. While the details are not clear, by about this time there must have been a Dunham family group playing. The pump organ was still more common than the piano in rural Maine homes at that time, as being less expensive, more portable, and requiring less maintenance. The Dunhams owned an organ, as did the Heywood Club, and Mellie’s daughter Pearl Dunham Noble had learned to accompany her father.

The third member of the group was Pearl’s husband Nathan Noble. Nate was another rural musician, born in 1876, a couple of generations younger than Mellie. He had grown up in the Noble’s Corner settlement in Norway, north and west of Mellie’s Crockett Ridge neighborhood. He started playing the fiddle when he was quite young, tutored by his uncle Harrison Noble, and began playing for neighborhood dances when he was 16. Harrison was a veteran of the Civil War, who had been a well-known fiddler before he joined the Norway Company of the 10^th Maine. He was wounded and lost his right arm, leaving a short stump. This did not stop him from playing, though he never again played for dances. A January, 1926 newspaper interview with Nate describes how it worked:

“He would sit down in a chair, rest his fiddle on his right knee, place the bow under the stub of his right arm, and work the violin back and forth with his left hand. He would finger it and twist it to hit the right string at the same time, of course he couldn’t get the pressure onto the bow to put the volume into his music as when he had his arm, but he played sweetly as ever and got in all the notes.

“It was from him, in this condition and by this painful process that Nate learned to fiddle.

“‘And’ he said to the writer in a burst of admiration for his uncle, ‘if I could take a fiddle under my chin with my two good arms and play as we ll as Uncle Harrison played with his relic of Cedar Mountain [the Civil War battle where he lost the arm], I swear I would fiddle all the time!’”

The Dunham Orchestra, with Gram, mid-20's; Nate in rear with cello, Cherry center.

Nate switched to the bass and cello when he started playing with Mellie, playing both as rhythm instruments, with a bow. He also acted as floor manager at Mellie’s dances, and by the time the group recorded in early 1926 Nate was the caller. While we see mostly plucked basses now, it appears that prior to about 1930 and the evolution of jazz styles all such playing used the bow, creating long, sonorous bass notes quite different from the highly percussive plucked style. Nate, who had his own orchestra during the 1930's and 1940's, seems always to have been a little suspicious of the new style. We are told that he was willing to loan his bass to someone who plucked it, but would invariably make sure that it hadn’t been put out of tune before he picked it up again himself.

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