Fiddles, Family, & Favorite Hymns: 
FiddleSticks & Lisa Arrington present “Farewell to Nauvoo”
By Kent Olmstead

When the Davis family band FiddleSticks knew their fiddler (daughter Katie) would answer a mission call to South Africa in the spring of 2006, they expected there would be some unfinished business to complete.  What they didn’t know was that they would end up completing two albums, including their newest CD, Farewell to Nauvoo.  

I recently exchanged emails with Mark Davis, a fellow member of LDSMusicians.com, the father of the Davis girls (Becca, Katie & Liz), and the guitar and bodhram (Irish drum) player for the Pearl Award winning FiddleSticks.  We discussed the events leading to this collaboration album with singer/songwriter Lisa Arrington as well as the history of the Davis family band.

Kent:  When did you first learn about Katie’s decision to serve a mission?

Mark:  Katie decided to go on a mission during her spring semester at USU in Logan in 2005.  At that time she and her sister were planning a CD, and we figured she would finish that up and we'd get it done before she left. They did that recording, called Ampersand, during the fall of 2005.

Kent:  And how did Ampersand lead to Farewell to Nauvoo

Mark:  While we were at the studio working on mixes in January (2006), we noticed that our sound engineer, Steve Lerud, was making one-off CD copies of a cassette tape by Lisa Arrington that she had done several years ago called "Hidden Treasures."  We had bought a copy when we were living in Maryland, and Lisa's recording spent many hours in our home and car tape players. After we moved to Utah in 1996, we got to know Lisa and her family and enjoyed hearing Lisa play and sing her tunes in person.

We often casually said that we should collaborate on a recording someday.  Something about seeing her making CD copies of a scratchy old tape finally got us into gear.  We loved hearing the tunes again, and that was enough of a catalyst to get us and Lisa working seriously towards this recording. The only hitch was that by the time we got the project in motion, Katie was just a few weeks from leaving for her missionary service in South Africa — so we got her into the studio and put the fiddle (and viola) parts down first.  That was about the middle of February, and she left for her mission to South Africa on the 22nd of February. 

Kent:  So Katie kind of went from the recording studio to the MTC!

Mark: Exactly.  And that wasn't even her last recording before leaving! About two days before she left for the MTC, the BYU Motion Picture Studio called and had her come and record the fiddle parts for the new Legacy Theater film on Joseph Smith.

Anyway, over the next several months we finished up the other tracks, including Lisa on piano and voice for most of the tunes.  Only Katie's sister Liz, the cellist, and I were left in town.  So we did our tracks and then got sister Becca, who lives in Hawaii, to put down some flute tracks at a studio there, and she transferred her parts back to Utah via the Internet.  We also recruited Liz's boyfriend (soon to be fiancé) Andrew Maxfield to play accordion as well.  We wrapped that all up in about June.  Then it took the rest of the summer to get it mixed and produced, but while it was a long time coming, we like the way it turned out.

Kent: Give us a brief description of the album.

Mark:  Farewell to Nauvoo includes nine of the twelve tunes Lisa arranged for "Hidden Treasures," plus seven more tunes. They are mostly old Mormon pioneer tunes — some hymns and some songs about the trail.  There are also some Shaker songs from the same period.  The challenge was to stay true to Lisa's arrangements, while still adding enough of our own flavor to make it seem fresh and give the album a FiddleSticks feel.  We’re already starting to get emails from people who say, “I had Lisa’s old ‘Hidden Treasures’ tape ten years ago, and I saw your new album in Deseret Book, I’m so glad to hear that music again.”  That’s what we were hoping for!

Kent: So did you learn some new tunes working with Lisa? 

Mark:  Yes, some are wonderful old tunes we had never heard before.  The first tune on the album is called “Now My Dear Companions” — which really should be a missionary anthem.  Lisa has done a lot of research and has collected some wonderful old hymns and songs that were really popular in the 19th century, and that deserve a revival.  Other tracks on the album are well-known hymns that we have played ourselves for years and even recorded before with different arrangements.  It was really fun to work with Lisa.

Katie and Liz also wrote some new music for the album.  In fact the title track “Farewell to Nauvoo” is a new song, though it sounds old.  The text is a poem written by a Nauvoo resident who had just been forced from her home onto the cold Iowa plains.  Liz wrote the music in the style of an old hymn. 

Of course, we didn’t want this to be just a Sunday Afternoon CD, though, so we added a few “dance around the campfire” tunes to crank up the tempo and mood a bit.  We didn’t want to leave the impression that the pioneers were a melancholy bunch — they loved dancing and music, and there’s some of that on the album as well.

So what did you like best about working with Lisa Arrington?

Mark:  Best of all, Lisa is a storyteller. We love hearing these lovely old hymns and songs through her colorful and personal vocal perspective. She doesn't just sing the songs — somehow with her singing she tells the stories in a way that brings the Mormon Pioneers to life.

Kent:  The final track is also quite interesting, and curiously enough doesn’t feature Lisa or FiddleSticks.  What can you tell us about it?

Mark:  We do a version of the “Handcart Song” with Lisa on the album, and while we really like Lisa's arrangement of this song, our favorite version of the “Handcart Song” was sung and recorded in 1951 by an actual Mormon pioneer named Margaret Graham Young Boyle. I did all kinds of detective work to try to piece together her story. 

At first, all we knew was what she says on the recording, her name, birth date and birthplace.  Eventually I found enough about her to fill in some of the blanks. Margaret was born around 1854 in Kirkintilloch, Scotland, and immigrated to Utah with her parents and 12 siblings in about 1872. (There is a little question about her year of birth: she says on the recording that she was born in 1854, but her pedigree at www.familysearch.org says it was 1855, and her Salt Lake obituary made it 1853.)

Margaret's recording of the “Handcart Song” was made by Utah folklorist Lester Hubbard. As she says on the recording, Margaret was 97 years old when she recorded this song.  She died in July 1952, not many months after making the recording. It is now in the University of Utah library special collections archives.  Hal Cannon, who was the founder of the Western Folklife Center, and who has done his own performances of pioneer songs, discovered the recording a few years ago, and got us a digital copy. What an amazing voice! 

Kent:  Could you please share a brief biography of FiddleSticks?

Mark:  We got our start in 1991 while living in Takoma Park, Maryland, playing places like the Maryland Renaissance Fair and the Washington DC Temple visitor center.  The girls’ mother, Kira was the force behind the music.  She was an accomplished harpist and singer, and early on cajoled the girls into performing with her. Kira died of cancer in 1997, and the girls' music has always been in part a way of staying connected to her.  The last track on the Ampersand album is a specific tribute and dedication to her by Katie and Liz.

Our music has been partly a fun job for the girls, part family home evening, and partly family therapy.  Playing together has taken us to places and events we probably would never have gone to otherwise.  We have performed for lots of music festivals and community fairs, various concert series, civic events — and lots and lots of weddings!   We’ve performed in just about every town in Utah, and all over the Mountain West, California, Maryland and New England. We even did a vacation/concert tour in Holland and Italy in summer 2000, and another in Japan in 2004.

In 2003 we did a reverse pioneer trek concert tour from Utah back across Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa, ending with a week long engagement in Nauvoo, Illinois. School and work scheduling can get a bit hectic, but we have usually managed at least fifty shows a year.  We're planning a New Zealand tour in 2008.

Kent: But you don’t just play live, right?

Mark:  Frankly, I think we are best live, since so much of our performance is in the mind-reading, body language, and improvisation that happens among the three sisters on stage.  But we’ve also enjoyed recording, and we’ve gotten a number of Pearl Award nominations (kind of like the Utah Grammys — only not!).  We have done eight CDs.  They range from Mormon hymns and tunes (like the new CD and an early one called Return to Nauvoo) to Celtic dance tunes, to a kind of celtic/bluegrass/Jazz fusion, and we also have a Christmas album.  You can find links to music samples from our recordings at our website: http://fiddle-sticks.com/FSListen.html

Kent: What are your personal feelings about having a family band?

Mark:  I think a family band is not something you would want to set out to create.  It has to just happen — in our case anyway, it happened organically, accidentally.  We just liked playing together, and people started asking us to play for this or that, and before you knew it we were getting paid for shows, and recording music.  Not to paint too rosy a picture, there were certainly "challenging" days, during those mid-teenage years when kids would rather do anything but be seen with their family, and we had our share of grumpy drives to shows.  But it seems like somehow once we got on stage and started playing, those feelings melted away and we always ended up feeling good about the music and about each other.

Kent: I’d like to thank Mark for sharing about his family and this wonderful new album.  FiddleSticks and Lisa Arrington will be performing selections from Farewell to Nauvoo at a CD release concert Friday, November 10th, 2006 (7:30-9:00pm) at the Noni International Paradise Stage, 333 West River Park Drive, Provo, Utah.  For more information contact marco@fiddle-sticks.com or visit http://www.fiddle-sticks.com.