Lady Muleskinner Press

Ernest Mostella

Ernest Mostella was a fiddle maker from Alabama’s St. Clair County, a rare practitioner of African American fiddle traditions surviving into the 21st century. When I met him he was in his nineties and full of excited vitality, still operating a power saw to carve his fiddles out of the raw trees. He lived alone in a one-room trailer in Ashville and talked and sang for as long as any visitor would listen.

I have included four samples of his singing here. I made these recordings of Mostella in 2000, in his home. The sound quality is not perfect, but I think the recordings are worth the listen, capturing the energy, humor, faith and passion of the singer near the end of his life. Hopefully in the future I will be able to make more of Mostella’s recordings available. Maybe others have also recorded him over the years.

Singing

1. Eat Fried Chicken, Uncle Ned, Uncle Joe (0:37)

This is a song Mostella used to play on the fiddle.  When he sang the da-dee-da’s at the end of this recording, Mostella moved both hands in the air to mimic the playing of the instrument. 

2. Nearer My God / The Titanic / Sad When That Great Ship Went Down (2:03)

The sinking of the Titanic inspired a number of songs, and provided Mostella with one of his favorite subjects.  During our visits, Mostella would return again and again to the Titanic, singing the songs and often talking at length about its sinking.

A real regret of mine is that in all of our visits I never heard Earnest Mostella fiddle. (All the sound files on this page are pure unaccompanied singing.) Mostella’s handmade fiddles were unwieldy contraptions, each of them with a look and dimensions of its own: blocks of hollowed-out walnut or pine, depending on what he could find (he would cut down the trees himself; long leaf pine, he said, was best), clunky fiddles strung up with twine, huge tuning pegs extending horizontally from either side. For most of his life he used a sturdy homemade glue to hold things together, a mixture of egg yolks and sawdust; later, if he could get a ride into town and if he had the money, he’d use carpenter’s glue. The bows were equally rough, strung with the same twine, and, like the fiddles, varying widely in size. These instruments were fascinating works of art as much as instruments. I was eager to know what kinds of sounds these things could produce in the hands of perhaps the one man in the world who knew how to play them.

Fiddle

Though spry and hilarious in his nineties, perhaps the older age had somewhat slowed his fiddle-making and -playing. Ernest Mostella was always at work, though, even at that age, and he sold the fiddles as soon as he finished them. (In the very last years of his life, he raised their price from 25 to $35; he might ask for a quarter down upfront if, before he had one ready, a customer pre-ordered a fiddle.) By the time I knew him he did not keep a fiddle around for his own use, perhaps because he could not keep up with demand, perhaps also because he could no longer play himself. Whenever I came around, he would have a fiddle made and no bow or a bow made and no fiddle–to this day my fiddle lacks a bow–and thus I never heard him play.  Before he died Mostella was moved to an assisted care facility in nearby Atalla; his woodworking abruptly stopped, though he would entertain the nurses with his enthusiastic singing and his ceaseless talk. Somewhere out there there must be a tape of him playing one of his fiddles. I think that to hear whatever music he could coax from one of those instruments would be a revelation and a joy.

Mostella did sing, though, all the way to the end, and for me his singing was revelation and joy enough. “Nearer My God to Thee”; “The Titanic”; “The Boll Weevil”; “St. Louis Blues”; “Muscle Shoals Blues”; “Let Me Be Your Sweetheart”; “Careless Love”; “Columbus, the Gem of the Ocean”; “God Bless America.” He made up songs of his own and strung together old songs with loose chains of association. His talk worked the same way, jumping from one association to another but somehow coming back suddenly to where it started: he would preach on Noah and the Ark and somewhere in his monologue the Ark would become the Titanic, leading him to speak of John Jacob Astor and rich men’s drowning maids and “Nearer My God to Thee”; and then he would be talking again of the people and animals saved in the flood of the Bible. This talk would be interspersed constantly with snatches of song, and with numerous reminiscences about his late wife Rosetta. A coal miner for most of his life, Mostella had long preached on Sundays (he was known in the neighborhood as “Preacher”). Sermonizing and story-telling came naturally to him.

Praying

3. Shape notes (0:30)

Here Mostella sings a brief melody in the tradition of the Sacred Harp, singing the names of each notes (do mi do, etc.) and ending in prayer.

Ernest Mostella’s grandfather–Gus Cochran, born into slavery–was a locally celebrated fiddler in his own time. He taught himself to play, Mostella said, after whittling a key to open the cabinet which housed his master’s fiddle. Cochran was about seven feet tall, an imposing character, and was in high demand as a musician. Mostella learned to play by watching this grandfather. One of his favorite tunes was the novelty number “Mockingbird.”

There were two decorations in Mostella’s trailer: a photograph of himself with a fiddle, and a much older, faded photo of Rosetta as a young woman. Mostella was especially eager to talk about her. He explained once that in his old age he had all but stopped sleeping; he would be up all night, alone, often passing the hours by singing to Rosetta. The recording included below suggests a good idea of what those late nights must have sounded like. The song is a kind of stream-of-conscious tribute to Rosetta; scenes from his courtship and marriage, expressions of grief, and interspersed lyrics and melodies of familiar tunes (”Corrina, Corrina,” “You Are My Sunshine”) weave in and out of the performance. I can not think of a real and raw expression of love and longing as moving or profound as these eight minutes; I do not expect to ever forget witnessing the tribute, watching Ernest Mostella disappear deep into the song. I hope that this and the other recordings included here will provide some small window, however incomplete, into this man’s character, his originality, his music and kindness.

4. Rosetta (8:20)

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Note: The above photographs of Ernest Mostella were taken by Colleen Cook Stonbely.

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I have included below the lyrics to Mostella’s improvised song to Rosetta. As Mostella himself sometimes said after singing a particularly emotionally- or spiritually-charged tune: “That song will make you cry.”

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