Music & Dance
BERNTSON FAMILY BAND
Washtington, CD and Los Angeles, CA
Norwegian American Band
In the early 1900s, Norwegian immigrant Bernt Berntson Bradskerud bestowed a violin upon his ten-year-old son Bennie, who began learning Scandinavian folk tunes from family and local fiddlers in his rural northern Wisconsin immigrant community. For the next thirty years, Bennie was a regular at house parties and community dances featuring Scandinavian waltzes, schottisches, and square dances.
Bennie’s son Maurice (guitar) and daughter Eleanore (pump organ) joined the family music circle in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, as did Bennie’s cousins Benny Smith (banjo) and Jimmy Severude (violin). In the ‘60s, Eleanore’s son Karl brought a second guitar into the group and at full strength, the Berntsons would have featured several fiddles, pump organ, banjo, and two guitars - a long way from Bennie Berntson’s solo fiddles sixty years earlier.
Today, the Berntson Family Band features the same traditional Norwegian song repertoire which has been played now by three generations, while employing many of the exact same instruments: a 1916 Beckwith family pump organ, a 1920s B & D tenor banjo, and a late 1930s L 5 style guitar. Eleanore Berntson Lundeberg has been playing this same repertoire on the same pump organ for seventy two years. She has transcribed scores of the old Scandinavian folk tunes she learned from her father.
Maurice Berntson’s knowledge of hundreds of folk tunes, learned over the course of eighty-some years, is the source from which the Berntson repertoire lives.
When not performing as part of the Bertson Family Band, Karl Fredrik Berntson Lundeberg is a CBS/Sony recording artist, a piano player and an award winning composer of contemporary classical, jazz, world music and rock. He currently is a writing partner with legendary songwriter Gerry Goffin.
Rounding out the Berntsons are fiddlers Andrea Hoag and Loretta Kelley and Karl’s daughter Marika on guitar. Andrea has studied with elder fiddlers Päkkos Gustaf and Nils Agenmark and is a graduate of Sweden’s Malungs Folkhögskola, and is known across the U.S. for her playing in American as well as Scandinavian folk fiddle styles. Loretta is one of America’s foremost players of the Norwegian hardingfele (Hardanger fiddle) and has made nearly twenty trips to Norway to study with master fiddlers. She has placed highly in Norwegian fiddle competitions and is a former president of The Hardanger Fiddle Association of America. Andrea and Loretta were 2007 Grammy nominees for Best Traditional World Music Album.
Links
http://www.berntsons.com/
http://cdbaby.com/cd/berntsonband
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