Finnish American musicians performing at the community center, Washburn, WI, summer 1981. L-R: Hugo Maki, Jim Leary, Bill Hendrickson, Olavi Wintturi, and Ray Maki. Photo: Janet Gilmore

By Jim Leary

In autumn 1980 I drove through whirling leaves to Herbster, Wisconsin, a run-down fishing and logging village settled by Finns on Lake Superior’s shore. It was the beginning of a project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts to document traditional music and I had just heard about an old accordion player. “He lives just behind the abandoned Co-op store, you’ll probably find him at home.” I did. But before I could introduce myself, Bill Hendrickson told me “I’ve been waiting for you. Come along.”

Hendrickson led me from his front porch around the side of the house to a cellar door. We descended, dodging crates of potatoes, bending our necks to avoid hanging cabbage heads. In the near darkness I could make out a weathered piano accordion, a cheap tape recorder, and a dust-covered box of cassette tapes. Hendrickson showed me his hands, twisted by arthritis, and explained that his hearing was fading. “I have to play loud and I’m not as good as I used to be. Down here I don’t bother my wife.”

Down in the cellar Bill Hendrickson was taping all the tunes he knew before they slipped from his memory or through his gnarled fingers. When he could no longer play them, he could hear them. And when he could no longer hear them, others could.

Driving home that day I thought about Hendrickson’s commitment to his tradition. And I pondered especially his opening words: “I’ve been waiting for you.” Over the next few months I recorded accounts of his musical life and his tunes on high quality equipment provided by the Library of Congress. I photographed him and saw that his old photographs were copied. Near the end of the grant period, I welcomed Hendrickson to a local archives where his collectanea had been deposited, and I organized a concert where he “played out” for the first time in forty years. Eventually I produced a recording that included one of his tunes.

Bill Hendrickson

Since that time I have had the good fortune to encounter others who have been “waiting.” Some wait for help in finding markets for their work, some wish to educate outsiders, still more hope to inspire their own people. Nearly all want to leave some lasting evidence of the cultural traditions they steadfastly sustain. And so, like many other folklorists working throughout the Upper Midwest, I have sought to find a better tape recorder than Bill Hendrickson’s dusty model, and a better archives than a potato hole.

Here at the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, we are well underway with an ambitious regional initiative to identify, archive, conserve, and make accessible a wealth of fieldwork materials—sound recordings, photographs, field notes, and more—that have been gathered by folklorists for decades. Thanks to a two year “Access” grant from the Folk Arts program of the National Endowment for the Arts, folklorist Janet Gilmore has been working with several folklore and library/archiving students to survey and organize field research materials created by fieldworkers in Wisconsin. And most recently Nicole Saylor, having earned an archiving M.A. and a Certificate in Folklore, has come aboard at CSUMC as our new folklore archivist.

More grants have been submitted, and years of work loom. But we have made a commitment to the legacy of Bill Hendrickson and those who, like him, have been waiting.

Jim Leary, a folklore and Scandinavian studies professor at UW–Madison, is co-director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures.