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Mellie Dunham: A Remembrance Norway Maine Summer Festival, July 2003, David Sanderson

Maine History Documents

The story of Mellie Dunham continues to fascinate, even some seventy-five years after the events. The tale of the 72-year-old country fiddler invited to play for Henry Ford, made famous by the media, then hugely successful as a vaudeville performer, seems almost too perfect to be true. But it all happened, and it was Mellie’s own grace and lack of pretense, a genuineness that inspired the public’s affection for him, that was as much as anything else responsible for the events of 1925 and 1926.

This booklet was created to mark Mellie’s 150th birthday, July 29, 2003. We call it …