This blog post is dedicated to Don and Norma,
Two friends from Nebraska who have danced many a waltz together.
Nebraska has no official state waltz.
There are however four songs titled Nebraska Waltz available in digital form. The only one of those four which clearly celebrates the state of Nebraska is by Nebraska native, Chris Sayre. Sayre is a singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist with a strong following in his home state. He has recorded three solo albums and his 2007 album titled Tunes from Along the Way contains his own Nebraska waltz titled The Nebraska Waltz. If the state of Nebraska wants an official state waltz, this is the one to select.
A second Nebraska Waltz is performed by Deadsea Horses (not to be confused with the group, Dead Seahorse). A correspondent tells this blog that Deadsea Horses is actually one person, who temporarily abandoned the Indie music scene to serve as a physician in Amarillo, Texas. In the interest of privacy, his name is being withheld until his permission to add it to this blog is received. It is an interesting Indie/folk approach to a waltz, complete with a devil's tritone chord. Why this song, which was originally found on the ReverbNation website, is titled Nebraska Waltz is a bit of a mystery - the lyrics do not involve Nebraska and the songwriters roots are in New Jersey, not Nebraska. The ReverbNation track has been dressed up with a dance hall photo to provide the video below.
The waltz arrived in the United States in the early 19th century and inspired many composers to write waltzes celebrating their native states. Many have been lost but a Nebraska Waltz written by Charles C. Poindexter as found in 1854 sheet music published by Balmer & Weber of St. Louis has been preserved and can be found in the Gaylord Special Collection of the library of Washington University in St. Louis. Here is a computer generated rendition of this early Nebraska Waltz:
For the second time in this blog series, a state waltz by a composer of serious classical music is featured. David Graves, originally from Nebraska but a long time resident of the San Franciso area, wrote a wind quintet piece titled Nebraska Waltz. Graves is a musician with many interests. He has not only been the resident composer for the Berkeley Symphony but also plays in the rock group ScienceNV and has recorded several albums of pop vocals (and in a secret past was Director of Medical Information at Genentech). His Nebraska Waltz composition was performed in October, 2011, by The Avenue Winds at a meeting of group of Bay Area composers known as the Irregular Resolutions. The program notes from that concert are worth repeating, "Nebraska Waltz was written for David's mother! The first 50 measures or so are characterized by a very dignified waltz, but it is interrupted by a tornado. (Hey, this is the sort of thing that happens in Nebraska.) The flute takes us home in the tornado's aftermath, complete with birds at sunset and our dignity returned." A recording from that concert is the basis for the video below:
Fans of the late Charles Kuralt's On the Road program on CBS may recognize something in the timbre of the voice singing Sweet Nebraska Land. That is because the singer (and fine banjo player) in the song is Roger Welsch, the man Kuralt turned to as the voice of Nebraska. Welsch also shared the song in his book A Treasury of Nebraska Pioneer Folklore where he reports that it was originally "collected by L.C. Wimberly from Cyrus Korben of Chase County, Nebraska." The tune is based on O Tannenebaum which is also found in state waltzes for Maryland and Iowa (although it is certainly "fixed up" for Sweet Nebraska Land). The song appears on Welsch's 1965 Smithonian Folkways album titled Sweet Nebraska Land.
The last video contribution to this blog about Nebraska waltzes is a beautifully constructed waltz titled Nebraska River Song. It was written by Ed Harvey and recorded on the 2015 Prairie Dog label CD titled Stories Seldom Told. Ed manages to tell a beginning/middle/end story AND mention all 14 of the major rivers in Nebraska. He suggests in the first video below that he missed two rivers and mentions the Nishnabotna as being one. The other is probably the Arikaree (which spends most of its life in Colorado) or maybe the Wood (which you could just about jump across at its namesake town). Ed was a long time resident of Nebraska but currently lives in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Two versions of Nebraska River Song are provided below. The first is a live, 2015 performance at the Mo Java Cafe & Roasting Company in Lincoln, Nebraska and the second is directly from his Stories Seldom Told CD. (For you folks in Lincoln, Ed is going to be back at the Mo Java on July, 27, 2018 - please attend and ask him to sing Nebraska River Song again).
Several libraries, for example the David Soren sheet music collection at the University of Arizona, contain sheet music for Windy Nebraska Waltz written by Nellie Miller in 1900. A digital copy has not yet been found.
Not included in this blog:
This website suggests that the record, Elmer Schied Story, contains Nebraska Waltz. Unfortunately, not true. It contains many waltzes but not one from Nebraska. It appears that the reference should have been to Nebraska Polka.
A search of copyrights using the Internet Archive resource has located six additional Nebraska waltzes which were written and copyrighted but may never have progressed to performance or publication. These include:
- The Nebraska Waltz, words and music copyrighted by Elmo Alexander Winston in an arrangement by Echo Galloway in 1951. In 1966, Winston obtained a copyright of his own arrangement with changed words.
- Nebraska Waltz, words and music copyrighted by Pearle Bohlken Remmers in 1952
- Nebraska Waltz, words and music copyrighted by Julia Wilson in 1953
- Nebraska Waltz, words and music copyrighted by Gloria O. Minarik in 1954
- The Nebraska Waltz, words and music copyrighted by Iola Davis Long in 1955
- The Nebraska Waltz, lyrics and music copyrighted by Robert W. Duley in 1978.
From the prairie fields of green
To where the hills of sand are seen,
It's Nebraska's dear land where I roam.
Take my hand, come with me
And we'll dance for all to see
To the waltz that we've made our own.
And no matter where we go,
We can't help but show
The love for Nebraska our home.
Take my hand, come with me
And we'll dance for all to see
To the waltz that we've made our own.
Return to the Index and Introduction
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