Peoria Journal Star 6-18-07 Click Here
Borders Instore Appearance
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WOW!!
Go check out the article by Dan Willging on Dennis and the new Gambler Fiddle CD in
Dirty Linen Magazine, June/July Isssue
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Cape Girardeau, MO 10-14-05
Dennis Stroughmatt Performs at The Red House and Brings it Home to Cape
Missouri Passages Journal
Winter 2003-2004
Old French
by Michael Bouman, Executive Director
I wish you could have seen the program I saw at lunch time recently in a faux-Tudor inn near the gigantic Amoco sign in St. Louis. You know that sign, don’t you? It seems half the size of Rhode Island -- an interesting reflection of marketing in a different time. There is nothing else quite like it for hundreds of miles.
At the program I saw a graduate of one of Missouri’s finest History Departments enchant an audience of convention-goers with a tale of his personal Odyssey into the old lead mining country in Missouri where French is still spoken. The first thing Dennis Stroughmatt told us was that he is not French. He is ½ Scotch and ½ Choctaw. He came to Cape Girardeau as a college student, and there met one of Missouri’s cultural heroes, Professor Frank Nickel, who, like Dennis, was a native of Illinois. Nickel sensed that Dennis had a special knack for making friends, so he said to him one day, “Why don’t you go find out about the French people up in Old Mines?”
And so Dennis, who had one semester of French to his credit, and not a very good semester at that, went of in search of “The French.” He found those old French-speakers eventually and they made him their friend, and he realized one day that he had learned to speak “French” because of all the songs and stories they had taught him. Dennis had also learned to play his great-grandfathers fiddle. He spent some time studying more French culture in Louisiana, and then capped off his study with some time in Quebec, where everything came together for him.
I loved this program because this Scotch-Choctaw lad from Illinois had, by nature of his very nature, become a Missouri Frenchman, in a manner of speaking. He has become the living continuation of a vanishing culture in the hills near Potosi. He had studied with older people during the last decade of the 20th century, people who were not connected to the internet or MTV, and who gathered to speak the old language and to sing the old songs. Precious cargo, this store of experience and memory in the soul of Dennis. Precious because, like Professor Nickell, Dennis has a knack for sharing what he has learned. I felt lucky to encounter him and his French music as with the old Amoco sign, it is a reflection of a time past that we are fortunate to carry forward for future generations.
Old Mines Music
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