Howard Wight Marshall was born in 1944 in Moberly, MO. He took his BA in English at Missouri and his MA and PhD in Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Dr. Marshall worked at museums, consulted for the Smithsonian Institution, worked for several years at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, and taught at Kansas State University. In 1982, he returned to Columbia to establish the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center in the Graduate School at the University of Missouri and to teach in the Department of Art History and Archaeology.

Howard Wight Marshall is Professor Emeritus and former chairman of the Department of Art History and Archaeology, and former director of the Missouri Cultural Heritage Center, at the University of Missouri in Columbia.

Life in academia means plenty of publishing; he has written several articles on Missouri fiddlers for The Old-Time Herald and Fiddler Magazine, and recently reissued the double-Grammy Finalist documentary project, Now That’s a Good Tune: Masters of Traditional Missouri Fiddling (Voyager Records 2008).  Marshall’s latest is on a subject dear to his heart:  Play Me Something Quick and Devilish: Old-Time Fiddlers in Missouri (University of Missouri Press) was released in early 2013. Marshall also records and produces fiddle CDs for Voyager Records.

A fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and banjo player (plectrum and five-string) and singer since the 1960s, Marshall plays for dances, school programs, and festivals and competes in and judges fiddlers’ contests. He credits the memory of his grandfather, Wiley Marshall, a country schoolteacher and farmer in Randolph County, with inspiring him to want to play the fiddle as a child. Marshall had the good fortune to learn tunes and techniques directly from Missouri fiddle legends such as Art Galbraith, Taylor McBaine, Leroy Canaday, Jake Hockemeyer, Johnny Bruce, Gene Goforth, Nile Wilson, and Pete McMahan. Marshall has judged fiddlers’ contests from Washington DC to San Francisco, including state contests in Missouri, New Mexico, South Dakota, Montana, Oregon, and the National Oldtime Fiddlers Contest in Weiser, Idaho. He competes in fiddlers’ contests large and small, and enjoys jam sessions, because, “That’s where the fiddlers are.”

Dr. Marshall and his wife, author and Westminster College English professor Margot Ford McMillen, with the help of two border collies, operate a small livestock farm a few miles east of Columbia in Callaway County.

http://mofiddledance.org/profiles/howard-marshall/

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