6. Ookpik Waltz

© Frankie Rodgers
Guitar arrangement ©Mike Agranoff

Guitar : Mike Agranoff

In the first pressing of this CD, this tune was erroneoudly listed as traditional. I have since found out it was penned by British Columbia resident, Frankie Rodgers. This Canadian tune, as it falls to my fingers on the guitar, with a few departures from the usual chording comes out sounding vaguely Texan. I play it in a really scary tuning I call "G-Whiz" tuning: standard, except with the bottom string tuned three frets high to a G. (Head for the bunkers!)

I offer the following learned commentary kindly sent to me by Timothy Garrison.

OOKPIK WALTZ. AKA and see "Eskimo Waltz," "Utpick Waltz," "Ootpik Waltz." Canadian, American;
Waltz. G Major ('A' part) & E Minor ('B' part) {Matthiesen, Phillips}: A Major ('A' part) & F # Minor ('B' part) {Reiner & Anick}. Standard. AA'B (Matthiesen): AABB' (Phillips): AA'BB' (Reiner & Anick).

A folk-processed tune (whose title has various spellings) that surfaced as a contest waltz in the West (first heard at the Weiser contest in the early 1970's being played by a group of Spokane fiddlers--Don Gish, Sheila Wright, et al—according to Seattle fiddler Vivian Williams). It quickly became widely disseminated and popular among many North American fiddling genres, though of late it seems to have lost its cachet among some fiddlers due to the frequency of its having been played and heard. Rumours and folklore have become attached to it, and stories of its having been composed by 'Eskimos' or that it was a Canadian or Eskimo dirge are common; many sources have asserted (although seemingly with little confidence) that it derived from the Pacific Northwest. Some stories have it that the tune was named for an Inuit funeral dirge, and that the Inuit believed “ook pik” was the owl that came to carry to soul away.

The facts sustain at least some of the folklore, albeit in a rather quirky way. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the word Ookpik is Inuktitut for "snowy" or "Arctic owl.” It was also the name of the most popular of Inuit handicrafts in the form of a souvenir sealskin owl, which featured an appealing large head and big eyes (a la the Disney cartoon characters). It was created at the Fort Chimo Eskimo Co-operative in Québec in 1963, and quickly became a worldwide symbol for Canadian handicrafts. The cute fuzzy, stuffed Ookpik owl doll was already popular image in Canada by the time of the Centennial (1967), which propelled it to even more fame.

Despite the rumours of antiquity, the “Ookpik Waltz” was not derived from a Native American source but is a composition of Mission, British Columbia, fiddler Frankie Rodgers, who has published it in a tunebook of his compositions. British Columbia fiddlers know the tunebook and the source well. It was also first recorded on his (c. 1960's) LP "Maple Sugar, Fiddle Favourites by Canada's Old Time Fiddle King Frankie Rodgers of the Rodgers Brothers Band" (Point P-250). Sheet music of “Ookpik Waltz” was published with a 1965 copyright to Rodgers.