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Barbara Lewis
Contributing Writer
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22
March 13 • 2014
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Fiddle Dee Dee
Local man wins tune-writing contest.
Adat Shalom Synagogue
Farmington Hills
$379
Devil's Dream: Bert Stein, Mackenzie Lerchen and Ryan Blankenship.
or Talbert (Bert) Stein, retire-
ment meant moving from
physics to fiddling — and
recently into a first-place win in
Fiddler magazine's first-ever tune-
writing competition.
Stein, 73, of Huntington Woods
grew up in Detroit and learned vio-
lin in the Detroit Public Schools.
He played from third grade until he
graduated from Cass Technical High
School.
In college, science took over as
Stein's primary passion. He studied
physics at Wayne State University,
earned a Ph.D. at Brandeis, com-
pleted a post-doctoral fellowship at the
University of Washington, and then
returned to Wayne State in 1970 as
an associate professor of physics and
astronomy.
For 45 years, he hardly touched his
violin.
When he retired in 2004, he said, "I
thought I might try to revive my inter-
est in music:' He wanted to try fiddling
— Celtic, bluegrass and old-time —
instead of classical music.
"I thought about joining a commu-
nity orchestra, but in classical music,
even though you can put a lot of emo-
tion into it, you pretty much have to
play what's on the page. The thing I
craved was the freedom to improvise
and play off the score he said.
Stein went online to find a fiddle
teacher and connected with Cheri
Whalen of Birmingham. She intro-
duced him to the type of music he
wanted to play. After only eight les-
sons, he went off on his own.
Through an online bluegrass forum,
Stein found local people to play with,
including Ryan Blankenship of Royal
Oak.
"We both laughed when we first
met, because I was expecting someone
older, like me, and he was expecting
someone younger, like him:' said Stein.
Despite a 35-year age difference, they
clicked. As soon as we started playing
together, we were really happy:'
A few years later, Stein met fellow
fiddler Mackenzie Lerchen. He was
fiddling at the Paint Creek Cider Mill
in Rochester when she introduced her-
self and asked him to play the classic
fiddle tune "Devil's Dream:' Soon they
were playing together.
Stein, Lerchen and Blankenship
formed a trio in 2010. They called it
Devil's Dream to reflect the tune that
started their relationship. Stein also
started composing fiddle tunes.
"I was on my daily 4-mile walk
through Huntington Woods, thinking
about fiddle tunes, and a new tune
just popped into my head:' he said. He
called it "Jig for Josh:' after his son,
who died in 2007.
"I had to keep it in my head for two
miles till I got home. Then I went right
to my computer and wrote it out:'
On successive walks, the tunes
started to flow. "It felt like a dam had
broken," Stein said. "I'd come up with
at least one a day, maybe more:' He
sings the tunes into an MP3 player/
recorder and transcribes them when
he gets home. He estimates he's com-
posed several thousand tunes.
Two years ago, Devil's Dream pro-
duced a CD of Stein's tunes, called
Tunes from the Woods. Stein also
self-published a wire-bound book of
40 jigs, reels and waltzes, also called
Tunes from the Woods. One, "Dream
on Lainy," is named for his wife,
Elaine.
Information about the CD and book
are on Stein's website: sites.google.
com/site/talbertsteinmusic.
Last summer, Stein saw a notice
for a fiddle-tune writing competition
in honor of Fiddler magazine's 20th
anniversary. Entries had to be unpub-
lished and unrecorded. He sent in two
of his tunes, "Recalculating Blues" and
"Muddy Clam:'
Late in January, Stein got a letter
telling him "Muddy Clam:' a jig, had
won first place, out of 110 entries.
The prize itself wasn't much — $100
and three DVDs — but Stein says he
felt like he'd won the lottery.
The tune will be published in the
quarterly magazine's spring issue.
❑