A Florida Fiddler: The Life and Times of Richard Seaman.

A Florida Fiddler: The Life and Times of Richard Seaman. By Gregory Hansen. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c. 2007. Pp. x, 254. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8173-1553-5.)

Richard Seaman was an acclaimed fiddler who continued to perform his traditional style and repertory--first learned in the early decades of the twentieth century--into the twenty-first century (he passed away in 2002 at the age of ninety-seven). Gregory Hansen qualifies the goal of his study, stating that his "presentation of Richard's music is a life history, but it is not a biography.... Rather, it is an inquiry into ways in which Richard Seaman thinks about his life in relation to his musical experiences" (p. 5).

Hansen knew his subject well. While serving as a public folklorist for Duval County, Florida, where Seaman lived, the author hosted the fiddler at numerous events. In both formal and informal presentations made to various audiences and in interviews with Hansen, Seaman offered insights into the lasting value of his cultural heritage. Fortunately, Hansen has thoroughly documented this particular master fiddler's wealth of musical and cultural experiences. Hansen's graceful, descriptive writing memorably channels Seaman's aesthetic and social attitudes, and the book's analytical passages sensitively illuminate the subtle contexts undergirding the fiddler's artistic imagination.

Topics addressed in the book include Seaman's apprenticeship years in Kissimmee Park, Florida (where he was born and reared), his efforts to keep his rural music alive after moving as a young man to urban Jacksonville, and his later role in disseminating traditional music to new generations. One chapter analyzes Seaman's fiddle repertory and style, while another focuses on his storytelling, a significant aspect of Seaman's identity as an artist and as a person. Hansen's book also contributes valuable insights into the complex interrelationships between the practitioners of traditional arts, the public folklorists who promote and interpret those practitioners, and the audiences who might learn from them. The book features numerous photographs and musical transcriptions of select tunes from the fiddler's repertoire. The most obvious shortcoming of this project is the lack of an accompanying audio CD containing recordings by Seaman (after reading this book, many readers will wish to hear the fiddler play).

Various disciplinary perspectives inform Hansen's book, including lines of theoretical inquiry borrowed from such academic fields as history, cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore. The book would particularly be of interest to scholars and students in interdisciplinary regional studies programs such as southern studies and Florida studies. Hansen--though quick to declare that his subject's fiddling did not typify "Florida fiddling" but instead was highly individualistic--nonetheless asserts that Seaman's story "provide[s] one important view of fiddling in the state" (p. 5). As concerned with the cultural contexts in which Seaman's music was historically performed as with his fiddle technique and repertoire, A Florida Fiddler: The Life and Times of Richard Seaman presents a vivid portrayal of a way of life formerly common in central and north Florida before that state was irrevocably altered, culturally as well as environmentally, by postwar tourism.

TED OLSON

East Tennessee State University