Merry music draws a crowd: Fiddlers Festival enlivens Fairbanks.

• Author: Pounds, Nancy
• Position: Alaska This Month

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Lively strains of old-fashioned fiddle tunes fill the large log-cabin building in Fairbanks, beating away the gloom of early winter darkness. The annual four-day Athabascan Fiddlers Festival, which runs Nov. 11 to 14 this year, reunites musicians and friends for traditional music as well as changing, youth-inspired melodies.

The event is held at the David Salmon Tribal Hall, 111 Clay St. Admission is $20 for the festival, which continues from 1 p.m. to 2 a.m.

The Fiddlers Festival is important to the community because it stirs the music of the heart and lifestyle, according to coordinator Ann Fears.

"We come together under one roof to celebrate another year," Fears said. "We are happy, healthy, drug-free and sober. We are at our best, encouraging each other to keep coming back. We love music."

The Athabascan Fiddlers Festival began in 1983. The fiddle music reflects North Country history. In the late 1800s and early 1900s miners and trappers settled in Alaska and introduced stringed instruments and harmonica to Athabascan people, Fears said.

The event sprouted after a year-long effort by the Institute of Alaska Native Arts to document Athabascan old-time fiddling, which was tagged as an endangered tradition by the Alaska State Council on the Arts, according to a 2003 report to the Tanana Chiefs Conference. Researchers found many musicians remembered meeting at the home of a Fairbanks couple each March when people converged for the spring carnival. Larger numbers required meeting in bigger buildings.

The Institute of Alaska Native Arts used grant funds to produce a two-day festival in 1983 with 40 musicians from 20 villages. The institute created a 30-minute videotape on fiddling for state school libraries. The institute could no longer produce the festival in the 1990s when state and federal funding declined, and the Athabascan Fiddlers Association was...