Product Review

Rafe and Clelia Stefanini, a dynamic father and daughter duo, are not from Appalachia or
anywhere near it but they play the music from that area with passion and authority. It all started
with Rafe who was born in the hills near Bologna, in north/central Italy, and didn t play
American music growing up, not until his late teenage years when he discovered the sounds of
bluegrass, blues and the folk revival from LPs he patiently obtained through the mail and from
the few record stores in his area that carried them.
He soon discovered the likes of Doc Watson and his family, the New Lost City Ramblers and the
Highwoods String Band, and he was hooked! In the late 1970s he decided to go and discover
old-time music at the source and he started traveling to the U.S. every year for months at a time,
going to fiddlers conventions and visiting old masters at their homes in the rural South. While
just a guitar player at the beginning, he started on the banjo and fiddle, soon becoming adept at
both. In 1983 he permanently moved to this country, got married and started a family. His only
daughter, Clelia, was born in 1990.
Clelia was not particularly interested in playing an instrument in her early to teenage years,
although she was exposed to and enjoyed an intensely musical life in the family with regular
trips to festivals, fiddlers conventions and visits to music friends. At age 14 she had an
epiphany, she recalls. At the Mount Airy Fiddlers Convention she heard a group of people
playing a rousing rendition of Joe Birchfield's Old-Time Train 45 and decided right then she
wanted to learn to play the fiddle. Rafe was more than happy to teach her. Now after 10 years,
she is one of the best players in the country, young or old, having won the first prize in fiddle at
the Clifftop music convention in 2013 arguably the Olympics of old-time fiddling further
cementing her status.
The music she makes with Rafe is powerful and inspired, with respect to the tradition they both
have adopted as their own.
1. Ladies Fancy
2. Lady Hamilton
3. Walking Boss
4. Fire on the Mountain
5. Fort Smith Breakdown
6. Wild Rose of the Mountain/28th of January
7. Give the Fiddler a Dram
8. Cripple Creek
9. Jack Wilson
10. Let Me Fall
11. Dusty Miller/Ma Ferguson
12. Old-Time Train 45
13. Sales Tax Toddle
14. Throw the Soapsuds in the Corner of the Fence
15. Hog-Eyed Man
16. Davy, Come Back Home and Act Like You Ought To