A life of music

Dudley Laufman said he never really thought he’d make a living out of making music. What he did know, however, was that Bob Brown was his hero.

Laufman, 80, is a world-renowned fiddler, storyteller, poet and keeper of contra dances and the music that accompanies them. Brown was a man who rented cabins and cut ice for the “summer people” on Long Island at Lake Winnipesaukee for their ice boxes and cream from milk he took from his cows when Laufman was a boy.

He “smelled of wood smoke and kerosene,” Laufman remembered, and he recalled his 6-year-old self thinking: “That’s what I want to do. I want to do it my own self.”

A stint working on a dairy farm in Fremont as a teen brought an introduction to “kitchen junkets,” house parties featuring traditional dance and fiddle music. It was just after World War II ended.

“People didn’t go too far for entertainment,” he said.

His appreciation grew, and Laufman “learned how to dance properly rather than just skipping around” while attending an agriculture school in Walpole, Mass., he said. He taught himself to call dances while at school and began dancing in Boston at events featuring Ralph Page, an iconic figure in contra dancing.

“He used to chant his calls, and I was fascinated by that,” Laufman said, “so I learned how to do it that way. His voice would rise and fall like another instrument.”

Laufman also remembers seeing Page come to a dance on a train with a briefcase containing his music and thinking, “That’s how he earned his money, and I thought, ‘That’s pretty neat.’ It was sort of beginning to work then.”

When he first settled his land close to Canterbury Shaker Village, music was part of his plan, but other work paid the bills – carpentry, ditch digging, “any odd jobs that would come along,” he said.

When Laufman cut his first LP record around 1971, he was working at a print shop. That job ended, and his performing began picking up. He has been making a living from it ever since.

Laufman recounted the story of old-time music and how it came to be a cornerstone in his life while sitting at the kitchen table in the cabin he built in 1957 – from two truckloads of wood and stone from a former Lutheran vestry in Concord.

It’s warm inside, heated by a small, but capable wood stove. There are two computers, but no television. Pots and pans line the open beams at the ceiling. The floor is a combination of carpet and stone, some rolled in from the property and set in place.

Summer squash and other vegetables from his extensive garden are in neat piles here and there. Potatoes are in rows, temporarily stored in the adjacent dance hall he has fixed to one end of his home, sharing space with the hockey fan’s skates hanging from its ceiling.

Laufman calls his place “cozy” and right in line with his “strong urge to want to do it my own self.”

“I just wanted to be my own boss,” he said.

Laufman plays a dusty fiddle about 150 years old, along with harmonica, accordion and concertina. He performs with his partner, musician and clogger Jacqueline Laufman, as the group Two Fiddles.

Their venues include barn dances, festivals, school events and town hall dances. They’ve been all over the world, playing in Wales, Canada, Greece and Turkey, among others.

Laufman was recognized in September in Washington, D.C., as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment of the Arts, and although he knew he had been nominated years ago, “I hadn’t planned it,” he said about receiving the recognition.

“It’s nice to know that what I’m doing has import,” he said.

Laufman added that he was “always sort of fighting against the stream,” whether it was playing hockey – not basketball – as a boy, being a conscientious objector when drafted and when he chose to play fiddle music.

He said the award has shown him “It’s OK to do this. It really caps that off.”

Don Himsel can be reached at 594-6590 or dhimsel@nashuatelegraph.com.