In Fairbanks, fiddling thrives—bridging cultures, sustaining traditions and filling the dance floor with life
Erin Gifford - Freelance writer
November 7, 2025 3:03 p.m.
For more than four decades, the Athabascan Fiddle Festival has filled community halls in Fairbanks with a sound that is both global and distinctly Native. Marc Brown
The moment you step into the dance hall, the sound envelops you. A fiddle erupts; an electric guitar wails; a keyboard drives out steady chords. Under colorful paper decorations dangling from the ceiling, couples two-step across a worn dance floor, while elders nod to the beat from folding chairs. The unwavering pull of the music unites everyone in the room.
Close your eyes and you might thin…
In Fairbanks, fiddling thrives—bridging cultures, sustaining traditions and filling the dance floor with life
Erin Gifford - Freelance writer
November 7, 2025 3:03 p.m.
For more than four decades, the Athabascan Fiddle Festival has filled community halls in Fairbanks with a sound that is both global and distinctly Native. Marc Brown
The moment you step into the dance hall, the sound envelops you. A fiddle erupts; an electric guitar wails; a keyboard drives out steady chords. Under colorful paper decorations dangling from the ceiling, couples two-step across a worn dance floor, while elders nod to the beat from folding chairs. The unwavering pull of the music unites everyone in the room.
Close your eyes and you might think you were somewhere in Appalachia, where fiddling is a bedrock tradition. But this is interior Alaska, thousands of miles away. For more than four decades, the Athabascan Fiddle Festival has filled community halls in Fairbanks with a sound that is both global and distinctly Native, a blend of Irish, Scottish and French reels layered with the cadence of the boreal forest and the Yukon River.
“In the early days, the trappers and miners are the ones that came down the Yukon River, taught the Native people how to play those stringed instruments,” says Ann Fears, general manager of the Athabascan Fiddlers Association, which created the three-day festival attended by nearly 40 bands. “[The Native people] would have their own dances. They just kept playing and getting better. [Growing up], I would watch the people dancing and singing. It was a highly spiritual event for me.”
This week, fiddlers, guitarists and singers from villages across Alaska have converged on the Chief David Salmon Tribal Hall in Fairbanks. The festival is equal parts reunion and concert, celebration and, more and more urgently, preservation. Many elders who carried this tradition have passed on, and rising travel costs make it harder for musicians in remote Alaskan villages to reach Fairbanks. And still, each year, the music rises again.
Origins along the river
Athabascan fiddling traces back nearly two centuries. In the 1840s, Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders made their way down the Yukon River, carrying fiddles and sheet music from Scotland, Ireland and France. Jigs, reels and polkas found new life in Athabascan villages along the water.
Athabascan culture stretches across interior Alaska, a landmass larger than California, encompassing dozens of rural Native villages. The fiddle serves as a community connection. Many Athabascan fiddlers learned by ear, reshaping melodies into their own rhythms and structures.
The character of the music evolved with the geography of the river. The upriver fiddling style, rooted in Gwich’in communities, remained lean and rhythmic, often featuring solo or twin fiddles, accompanied by guitar. It drove square dances, jigs and reels. The downriver style, associated with Tanana and Koyukon Athabascans, absorbed outside influences during the Klondike and Nome gold rushes. This style embraced larger ensembles, adding piano and vocals, favoring slower tempos and wide repertoires well suited to community halls.
Key takeaway: Gwich’in music and dance
- The Gwich’in communities of Alaska play instrumental music that was influenced by white explorers and traders. They also blended jigs, reels and square dances with their Native dances.
For generations, these styles stayed separate, divided by distance. With the founding of the Athabascan Fiddle Festival in 1983, upriver and downriver styles began to co-mingle, creating a shared space where musical traditions blended and took on new life on a single stage.
A living tradition
The annual festival unfolds over three days each November. The music runs nearly nonstop, from noon to midnight and into the early hours of the morning. School groups arrive in the afternoons. “They learn how to two-step, and they learn some of the dances from the elders,” says Fears. “There’s a lot of growing and teaching and having fun throughout the day.”
The event is family-centered and alcohol-free, a point of pride for organizers. “Alcohol kind of ruined families—it tore them apart,” Fears explains. “Families can bring their children, and they can be safe at this community event.”
For those unable to make the trip to Fairbanks, the Athabascan Fiddlers Association broadcasts the entire festival on KRFF 89.1 Voice of Denali radio, carrying the music back into the villages that gave it life.
Passing the torch
Keeping this tradition alive requires more than one festival a year. It requires teaching. Across interior Alaska, programs connect youth and elders through music.
The Dancing With the Spirit project, founded by Chief Trimble Gilbert, travels into remote tribal communities, making fiddling more accessible. A master Gwich’in fiddler and spiritual leader, Gilbert received a National Heritage Fellowship in 2024 from the National Endowment for the Arts. His vision is simple: put fiddles and guitars into children’s hands, with elders by their side, so children learn not only the music but the culture.
Their teaching method consists of a color-coded system of dots on the strings, explains Belle Mickelson, the program’s director. “In the very first hour, the kids can play the four main chords,” she says. Over the past two years, Dancing With the Spirit has conducted more than 50 weeklong music camps in remote villages. For students who show promise, the program may leave behind instruments. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the organization created video tutorials and distributed flash drives loaded with videos and lessons for villages without reliable internet.
“There are elders in the classroom, and I really feel like the culture that we bring is even more important than the music,” says Mickelson, who began playing the fiddle herself at age 10. “You know, connecting them with these elders.”
In Fairbanks, Young Native Fiddlers provides another anchor. Meeting on Saturdays during the school year, the group teaches children and teens both fiddle and guitar. For some, it’s their first structured lesson. For others, it’s a way back to the traditions of their grandparents.
Musical masters
The festival’s stage showcases musicians who keep the tradition alive while pushing it forward. One of the best-known is Angela Oudean, a bluegrass fiddler who grew up in Anchorage. By age 16, she co-founded Bearfoot, a successful Americana band. Today, she is among the festival’s most in-demand performers, hired year after year to back up bands in need of a fiddler.
“I get to hang in there and play solos and do my best to back them up,” she says. “It’s exciting. It can be kind of an adrenaline rush. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You just really have to be on your toes the whole time.”
She thrives on the improvisation that the festival demands. “Everybody is just coming from all different places and meeting up and just sharing music,” Oudean says. “I’m really lucky: I get to play with lots of bands, all from different places, with different styles.” Beyond the stage, she carries that passion into the classroom. She has taught across Alaska, traveling to more than a dozen villages where fiddling might otherwise fade.
Another key player is Marc Brown, a Koyukon Athabascan guitarist, singer and bandleader of Marc Brown & the Blues Crew. Born in the small interior Alaska town of Huslia, Brown has played the festival since its second year. Known for his guitar-fiddle duels with Oudean, he bridges genres, moving from blues and Americana to gospel and country.
“My great-grandfather, Sammy Sam, was a really talented fiddler, one of the best fiddlers I’ve ever heard,” says Brown. “A lot of his sons played, including my grandfather. [But], even as a 4-year-old, I remember wanting to play guitar.” Today, Brown sees himself as an accidental bridge. “I can play the old style, but I can [also] play newer rock to back up the younger guys [on fiddle],” he says.
Deeper musical meaning
Fiddle music in Alaska is functional music that must be in motion. Jigs, waltzes, two-steps and square dances fill the hall nightly, with four generations often dancing side by side.
Favorite festival dances like the Rabbit Dance and the Duck Dance are woven into every gathering, especially cherished by young people. The dances not only pass culture to the next generation but also offer healing and joy for adults. “When I’m dancing, I’m in my own world,” says Fears. “I look around and see people smiling.”
Some songs have become festival mainstays, their stories as enduring as their melodies. “Eagle Island Blues,” composed in the 1940s by Tom Patsy while plodding in snowshoes to Nulato, was born of sorrow, as he realized he would miss a Christmas dance with his beloved. Another festival favorite, “Indian Rock ’n’ Roll,” blends traditional fiddling with a rhythmic backbeat. Its popularity reflects the musical genre’s openness to new sounds while holding fast to its roots.
Looking forward
As the clock ticks past midnight, the hall is still alive. Toddlers doze in their parents’ arms, but the music and dancing continue. Onstage, a fiddler launches into a reel, the guitarist follows, and the keyboard strikes a fresh chord. The crowd surges once more.
Oudean is hopeful. “I think the younger fiddlers are continuing the tradition, learning the old songs,” she says. “Fiddling is one of those things that is pretty traditional, [so] you learn the old songs.”
That said, old-time fiddling is still evolving. “It’s changing because the younger ones are choosing different instruments,” says Fears. “These younger ones are more music-savvy. They mix their own music now, and they learn how to play the different stringed instruments.”
For those who attend, one thing is for sure: Old-time fiddle music is no relic. It is a living, breathing force, carrying history, resilience and joy into the future, just as it has since the first fiddles floated down the Yukon River nearly 200 years ago.
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