Celebrated Athabaskan fiddler Bill Stevens raised his bow for his last public performance ever back in 2023 at the Fairbanks Pioneer Home, an assisted living facility.
Lisa Jaeger, his frequent musical partner, accompanied him on the guitar that day. She said she remembers it well.
“Bill would play it at a lickety-split pace,” Jaeger said. “We had to keep up with him. One of the things I really liked about Bill, being a guitar player myself, was that when he'd start a tune, he wouldn't tell you what the name of the tune was going to be playing, but he'd tell you the key — a good clue for the guitar players.”
Stevens died in Fairbanks late last month at the age of 92. But friends and fellow musicians say his music will live on through his students and in programs that spread fiddling across rural Alaska.
Stevens grew up in Fort Yukon, where fiddle music and dancing had been a staple at Gwich’in potlatches. In his autobiography, “Ch’adzaa Aghwaa” — a Gwich’in phrase that means “He Carries the Dance” — he wrote that Scottish and French Canadian fur traders brought fiddles and jigs to the Athabaskan villages in the Northern Interior over 150 years ago when they came to work for the Hudson Bay Company. But those lively refrains just stuck.
Kaylee Nelson is the parish administrator for St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Fairbanks, where Stevens attended. Nelson says she’ll miss the lilt of Stevens’ fiddle bouncing off the church walls. He performed jigs in the parish hall and at special services, like Christmas Eve.
Nelson said those songs helped keep her culture alive.
“I don't know my language, and it hurts, but when I sing to the music, it makes me feel connected to my people,” she said. “It's hard to think about our history and our past, and it just makes you think about how resilient we are together when we come together, when we sing together.”
Former St. Matthews rector Scott Fisher, who was friends with Stevens for decades, described him as a true gentleman, in the old sense of the word.
“He was humble,” Fisher said. “I remember when we did a Christmas pageant here, and we decided to use adults because it was too hard to get kids. Bill was one of the three wise men, dressed as an old trapper.”
Stevens’ friends recall that his faith and St. Matthews were a huge part of his life. The century-old wooden church is a meeting point of many different cultures, with traditional celebrations sometimes taking place in the parish hall — like jigs.
Fr. Steve Reed, the church’s current rector, said jigs are a way of honoring the culture, tradition, and history of its parishioners — and inspiring joy and hope in times of darkness, cold and loss. For that, he said, Bill Stevens was key.
“Much of the world has acted shamefully when it comes to oppressing Indigenous people and suppressing languages and culture and traditions,” Reed said. “So, here you had Bill teaching it, bringing it back, reviving it, people singing it, remembering it.”
Stevens also trained generations of new Athabaskan fiddlers through programs like the Young Native Fiddlers. Cordova-based reverend Belle Mickelson founded Dancing with the Spirit, a series of traveling music camps serving rural Alaska communities that Stevens helped teach. She said their goal was always bigger than just the music.
“In a week, we really make those connections with the kids,” she said. “And then, by the end of the week, we usually have the elders and our other musicians talk to the kids about how important it is to stay away from drugs and alcohol, graduate, and become leaders in their community.”
Friends and fellow musicians also remember that Stevens overcame years of personal struggles. Mike Mickelson is Belle’s son and performed with Stevens over the years. He traveled from village to village with Stevens to teach music through Dancing with the Spirit.
“The thing about Bill is that he went through some really challenging times when he wasn't playing music,” Mickelson said. “There were a lot of things in his life that other people haven't come back from, and music pulled him out of that. I think that's at least one of the reasons why he was so generous with young people and just trying to help them out in any way that he could.”
Belle and Mike Mickelson say they’ll always remember him for encouraging Alaska Native youth to be their best and for helping connect them to their identities through Athabaskan fiddle music — sometimes even gifting them his own instruments.
“He was the one that really kind of opened the door and said, ‘This is the history of this music in this part of Alaska,’” Mike Mickelson said. “I'm really, really sorry to see him go. But man — he was here a long time and really influenced a lot of people, and we're all better for it.”