"Bockfot" has for a long while held the place of a particularly recurrent small nightmare in my life. It first appeared on the tentative list of a release way back last winter, accompanied by a legend that always makes me apprehensive: “No notes yet." As the deadline for my copy drew near and apprehension edged toward panic, I tried to get some basic information from headquarters, about which I could weave some fantasy. "We don't quite know what it is," I was told. "It's some more Swedish fiddle music, but they haven't sent the titles or the liner stuff from Stockholm.'' (Someday I will discover how they select material for release!) At the ultimate second, there was a decision to excise "Bockfot" until some later date. And then it would begin all over again.
'Meanwhile my unerring linguistic instincts had correctly suggested what the word meant (which was more than they knew in New York.) Bock means "goat". ("The bock stops here!" says the dedicated beer-drinker to the bartender.) And in Old English fot means "foot". Ergo, "goatfoot." But in the end, this wasn't much help, because all I could connect goatfeet with (de goatfoot connected to de anklebone) was Pan and assorted satyrs.
Well, at long last the notes and titles have arrived, and I wasn't too far off after all. "Goatfoot" is, in this case, an alias for the Devil or Old Nick (a sobriquet supposedly derived from the Christian name of Niccolo Machiavelli, but more likely from nixie or nicker, a water-spirit.) Now His Infernal Badness is traditionally imaged as a quasi-human figure with horns. shaggy legs, and hooves, an idea that obviously owes a good deal to the satyrical nature-deities of the classic world.
What has all this to do with Swedish fiddling? Quite a bit, apparently. You will recall that in the wake of the wave of fundamentalist piety that rolled over Sweden in the nineteenth century there were wholesale fiddle-burnings inspired by the quite rational notion that the Devil was wont to inhabit such instruments. Moreover--the "Bockfot" notes tell me--it was rumored that the best tunes were learned from the trolls, and that Satan himself controlled the fingers and bowarms of the best fiddlers. And even today, apparently, "Bockfot" is applied to the most seemingly inspired (or demonic) fiddlers.
Among those to whom the term is regularly applied are Bjorn Stabi (B-YERN STO-bi) and Pers Hans (PAIRS HONNS), who are responsible for the diablerie here. Stabi, born in 1940, had won sufficient notice by 1969 to be invited to play at the Newport Folk Festival. Pers Hans is two years younger and represents the third generation of demon fiddlers in the Olsson family. (His grandfather was Per Olle Andersson, his father Pers Erik Olsson, and I refer you to earlier records in this series for a key to the mysteries of Swedish rural names!)
For those uninitiated in the Swedish polska tradition, I should say that the term "fiddle" is not to suggest the bagpipe nasality of the American country fiddle. The instrument is played as a rich-voiced violin. The music itself is tuneful, subject to much embellishment--and, to my ears, has that quality of sameness common to all fiddle music (but then I antedate the contemplative, or stoned, generation, to whom variety is anathema.) The liner notes, by the way, are richly informative, but I can't believe there was ever a fiddler called Hinders Jerk!
