Missouri Traditional Fiddle & Dance Network

John White

Hallsville, Missouri

John White stands at the old Lily Dale one-room schoolhouse where he played square dances for many years. Betty White photo.

Sometime between 1936 and 1951, John Thurman White learned to play the fiddle. He doesn’t remember it; as far as he’s concerned, there was never a time before fiddling.

John White’s maternal grandparents, Thurman and Minnie Fields.

A handful of John’s first tunes came from his grandfather, Thurman Fields, but after determining John’s Arkansas Traveler was just too good, his grandfather refused to give John any more lessons. So, unlike most fiddlers of his generation, John learned the majority of his earliest tunes from a woman: his mother, Lucille (Fields) White. John’s grandfather had also refused to give Lucille fiddle lessons; he didn’t believe a woman should play the fiddle (though banjo was okay). Lucille wasn’t easily discouraged. She’d snuck off to learn from an uncle, Wally Hulet, a bachelor, hermit, and a bit of an animal whisperer, who lived so primitively they said he drank the water “pollywogs and all.” Lucille also played five-string banjo, piano, and guitar; she and her husband, Von, also a fiddler, were farming near Ethel, Missouri when John was born in 1936. The family lived in Ethel, Marceline, and Clarence as John went through his school days. At Clarence High School, John learned to read music (and play trumpet). Serendipitously, his band director’s father was one E. F. Adam of St. Louis, who had written a book of fiddle tunes, Old-Time Fiddlers’ Favorite Barn Dance Tunes (1928). John acquired a copy and had his first realization that fiddle music could be written down, and read. The book became a favorite source for new tunes, and paved the way for John to use written sources for many more tunes, all of which he edits to suit his own ears.

John White in the Army, El Paso, Texas, 1959

When John joined up in 1959, the Army quickly identified him as an expert rifleman—like a lot of farm kids, he’d grown up shooting and had plenty of practice—but also as a quick learner. The Army sent him to school, where he was so successful that he wound up editing technical manuals for then-cutting-edge technology in radar and surface-to-air missile technology. John soaked up the knowledge and still maintains a strong interest in science, especially physics. That curiosity and willingness to try something new is exactly the way John approaches music, even now; for instance, he recently played a dance with guitarrón backup.

John says he didn’t really learn to fiddle dances until the Lily Dale dances. Lily Dale was a one-room schoolhouse near Clarence, MO, closed as a school by 1953. When community dances started there in 1960, John naturally wound up behind a fiddle; he’d graduated from high school at Clarence a few years earlier, and was part of the community even though he was, by then, living at the University of Missouri as a first-year student.

Lucille White holds a very young John.

John says the dancing was fast and furious, with lots of “whoopin’ and hollerin’,” and charged him up like nothing else. The dancers didn’t care if the tunes were fancy—they wanted a good steady beat, and they wanted to dance all night, which meant a fiddler had to have endurance above all else. John says it was those dancers who really made a fiddler out of him. He learned to keep his movements small and his focus on steaming ahead, regardless of what havoc broke loose on the floor or in the band.

Though John moved to Columbia, in central Missouri, in the 1960s, he never left his North Missouri sound behind. Contact with “horney-pipe” fiddlers brought John classics like Flowers of Edinburgh, Rickett’s Hornpipe, and the Canary Waltz, and they were absorbed into his repertoire without a hitch. When he went home, his mother backed him up on a little keyboard set to “organ” at her kitchen table, and she would scold him for playing “too note-y,” as he dressed up his tunes with the melodically complex touches he’d heard in Boone and the surrounding counties.

John White’s parents, Von and Lucille White.

John claims to be a dance fiddler first and foremost, and it is true that he is nowhere as at home as playing for a crowd of dancers—and the more raucous, the better. But it would be an understatement to consider him “just” a square dance fiddler, as his tunes include a surprising variety: everything from pop radio, to New England-style contra tunes, to Grand Old Opry favorites from the 1940s, to the hits of the gay ’90s are run through John’s filter and turned into something that works with his style and preferences. The process seems to be a bit like whittling: he’ll say he just learns the notes, then keeps taking them out till it feels like a good tune.

John has informally taught fiddle to young people for decades; he’s also been a master at Bethel Youth Fiddle Camp for many years, sending many young fiddlers off with a solid core of Missouri tunes to build on.

In the early 2000s, John and his wife, Betty, began hosting a community dance themselves, in their small central Missouri town of Hallsville. The band is open, calling is open, and a jam and potluck precede every dance. In the more than 15 years since, a dedicated community has grown around the dance. A few have learned to call dances—a necessity when calling is in the set. More than one young person has gone from beginner fiddler to a solid dance fiddler, and a few have gone on to college music programs or even professional music careers, spurred in part by the fun they’ve had at Hallsville. Perhaps most impressively, a community of dancers has also grown, many of them young people who’ve danced through high school or college—some now even come back with families of their own. None of this would have been possible without John White’s love of nurturing learners, and his laid-back, accepting nature that’s happy to see anybody dancing or playing music.

John has been featured on two CDs: Nine Miles of Dry and Dusty, Voyager Records, 2007 and A Little Further Down the Road, Missouri Valley Music, 2017.