Wort Residency Lecture 4: “William Calls It a Fiddle”: The More-than-Colonial Lives of Peter Johnson and His Violin (with reception following)

The story I tell in this lecture begins with a teenaged merchant’s apprentice in colonial Philadelphia, Peter Warren Johnson (Canajoharie Mohawk/Irish), and the London-made violin he bought because it reminded him of home. A son of Sir William Johnson—the Crown Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern District—Peter later died fighting for the British in the Revolutionary War, and his violin was probably plundered along with other goods left behind by Loyalist refugees like his mother, Konwatsitsiaienni/Molly Brant, who fled her family’s Kanien’keha’ka town of Canajoharie for Canada. Tracing the part of Peter’s life that was lived with the mundane, yet culturally multivalent sound of the fiddle sheds light on the overlapping networks that let him move between his families’ territories, languages, and sound worlds. Yet it was also the severe disruption of these networks from 1774 onward that propelled him and his violin into “world” history, as it is usually understood. That raises questions about the conditions by which certain musical lives appear to have major or global significance and about what other stories lives like Peter’s might have to tell.