Fiddling with History
David Crockett and the "Devil's Box."
By: William Groneman III 02/01/2007
Fiddlesticks—or not?
The basis for this growing legend first appeared in James M. Morphis’ The History of Texas from its First Discovery and Settlement in 1875, 39 years after the battle, as a quote attributed to Alamo survivor, Susanna Dickinson. As the wife of Alamo defender Almeron, she endured the 13-day siege, surviving with the couple’s infant daughter, Angelina. Morphis, reported Dickinson as saying, “Col. Crockett was a performer on the violin, and often during the siege took it up and played his favorite tunes.”
Another bit of evidence came to us more circuitously. In the early 1930s, Amelia Williams used Susanna Arabella Sterling (nee Griffith), granddaughter of Dickinson, as a source for her doctoral dissertation, “A Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo and of the Personnel of its Defenders.”
Sterling, close to 70 years old at the time of the interview, related stories about the Alamo her grandmother had entertained her with while Sterling was a child and young woman. One such story she shared with Williams was that of Alamo defender, John McGregor. “One story that always amused her,” Williams wrote, “was Mrs. Dickerson’s [sic] account of John McGregor and his bagpipes. She said that when the fighting would lull, and the Texans had time for rest and relaxation, John McGregor and David Crockett would give a sort of musical concert, or rather a musical competition, to see which one could make the best music, or the most noise—David with his fiddle, and John with his bagpipes. She said McGregor always won so far as noise was concerned, for he made ‘strange, dreadful sounds’ with his queer instrument.” Later on in her dissertation, Williams added that Crockett “often ‘played tunes on the fiddle’ when the fighting was not brisk; and that sometimes he played in competition with John McGregor’s bagpipes.”
No one knows if these stories are accurate depictions of scenes enacted in the Alamo or simply stories told by a grandmother to entertain her young grandchild. It is possible that this story may have become embellished in the process of being relayed from Dickinson to Sterling to Williams over a span of 60 years. We also do not know how accurate Williams’ transcription of the story may have been, as other information she gave regarding Sterling is questionable. For example, Williams described Sterling as having died in August 1929 at the age of 83. Records indicate that Sterling passed away on July 17, 1929, at 74 years old.
Another claimant to Alamo fame, Andrea Castañon de Villanueva, supposedly commented on Crockett playing a fiddle. The celebrated Madam Candelaria, as she became known, enthralled visitors to San Antonio with tales of the siege and battle, and her care for the ailing James Bowie. At least three of her stories appeared in newspapers in the 1890s. Only the last one, published the year of her death, contains the statement, “They had supper at my hotel and there was lots of singing, story telling and some drinking. Crockett played the fiddle and he played well if I am any judge of music.” (Since Candelaria’s accounts all tell varying stories of the Alamo, she is considered less than a credible source by historians today.)
A fourth source describing Crockett’s musical skills comes from Robert Hall, an early Texas settler, who published his memoirs in 1890 and wrote of Crockett playing a fiddle at a frolic in Tennessee before leaving for Texas. The tale is somewhat less than reliable since the editor of a modern edition of the memoirs cautions readers not to rely on everything written by Hall, who is described as part of a breed characterized as “authentic liars.” One has to wonder why the editor republished the memoirs in the first place.
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