Since the day he was born, May 16, 1934, Dwight Lamb heard fiddle music being played or listened to in his family’s home. His father, Clarence, played the fiddle and his mother, Mary played the pump organ and almost every evening there was music in the house. Clarence also tuned the radio to fiddle programs featuring great Midwestern fiddlers like Casey Jones and Bob Walters and Dwight listened intently to these fiddlers. Dwight fell in love with the fiddling of Bob Walters and sometime around 1953 drove to Burt County, Nebraska to find Bob. He recorded hundreds of hours of Bob’s fiddling and also learned many of his tunes and is still playing them to this day.
Dwight was also lucky to have a grandfather that played Danish dance tunes on the single row button accordion. His grandfather, Chris Jerup, left Denmark in 1893 with his fiddle, accordion and a head full of wonderful dance tunes. Dwight has done a great deal to save all these wonderful tunes in the “Missouri Valley style” of fiddling and the Danish tunes. He is very generous with his music and has helped many young musicians get started on fiddle and accordion. He recently was awarded a “National Heritage Fellowship” from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Bill Peterson has been learning tunes from Dwight since 2001 and has also traveled extensively with Dwight to festivals and concerts all over the United States and Denmark. Bill plays fiddle with the Sioux Falls Ceili Band and fiddle and guitar with the Sergeant Creek Stringband. He is co-founder of the Sioux River Folk Festival, now in its 39th year.