National Endowment for the Arts Statement on the Death of National Heritage Fellow Dwight Lamb

Washington, DC—It is with great sadness that the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledges the passing of Danish button accordionist and Missouri-style fiddler Dwight Lamb of Onawa, Iowa. With more than 60 years’ commitment to collection, recording, preservation, and teaching, Lamb mentored generations of regional and international musicians. He was named the 2017 recipient of the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship, presented annually to an individual who has made a significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of cultural heritage.

A fourth-generation old-time fiddler and button accordion player Dwight “Red” Lamb was a master of Danish fiddle and accordion traditions, as well as Missouri Valley old-time fiddling. Lamb, known for his unusual left-handed fiddle style, was born in Moorhead, Iowa, in 1934 into a musical family. “Mainly, I loved the tunes and the melodies…. I had music around the house all the time. And every night I’d start humming what my grandfather played on the accordion,” said Lamb in a 2017 interview. He played his first dance on the single row ten-button accordion alongside his Danish grandfather, Chris Jerup, who emigrated from Snevre, Denmark, in 1893, and who learned the fiddle and button accordion from his own father. In 1961, Lamb—also a protégé of Missouri Valley fiddler Uncle Bob Walters, a radio fiddler from Tekamah, Nebraska—entered his first fiddle contest. Lamb went on to win numerous awards from fiddle and accordion contests, and, as a nationally certified judge, he adjudicated contests in nine states.

Lamb was a musician, mentor, and teacher. Without his efforts, the majority of available recordings of Missouri Valley musicians such as Bob Walters, Casey Jones, Cyril Stinnet, and Lena Hughes, as well as their unique styles, repertoires, and stories, might have been lost. His broad repertoire reflected the confluence of his heritage and his region, as the Missouri Valley fiddle tradition reflects a unique melding of Anglo-Irish traditions with the Scandinavian, Eastern European, German, and Canadian influences of the upper Midwest.

In recognition of Lamb’s preservation of this complex regional style, the state of Missouri invited him to perform at the 1991 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. He was featured again at the 1996 Smithsonian Folklife Festival (which helped to mark the Iowa Sesquicentennial) as well as for the 1996 Iowa Folklife Festival. Lamb received the Iowa Arts Council’s 1998 Folklife Award and received Traditional Arts Apprenticeship grants in Iowa, South Dakota, and Missouri. Lamb made numerous recordings, including for Rounder Records; was featured on the 1996 Iowa State Fare: Music from the Heartland album (Smithsonian Folkways); and appeared on Iowa Public Television. He also performed in San Antonio at the 2011 International Accordion Festival and at the 2011 Tønder Festival in Denmark.

Lamb’s international reputation came about late in life with the discovery in Denmark of his album Joseph Won A Coated Fiddle (Rounder, 1999). The inclusion of old Danish buttonbox tunes he learned from his grandfather on the album sparked repatriation of a lost repertoire that had gone extinct in Denmark. In 2010-11, Danish accordionist Mette Kathrine Jensen Staerk and fiddler Kristian Bugge invited Lamb to Denmark, where he played to sold-out halls. In this tribute video to Lamb, Bugge comments that “a lot of people like this story [and] are starting to play the tunes. It’s pretty awesome.” In 2015, the Danish National Commissioner of Musicians awarded Lamb their highest honor, the Rigs Fiddler (Silver Coat) Award, for his work in returning Iowa’s Danish music to its homeland.

Watch Dwight Lamb’s performance at the 2017 NEA National Heritage Fellowships concert on September 15, 2017, at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC.