Michael Landon was known as a perfectionist on the set of Little House on the Prairie, but there was one rare area that he let slide.
Landon, who played patriarch Charles “Pa” Ingalls on the NBC drama series from 1974 to 1982, didn’t have the musical skills that Pa did—at least not on the fiddle—and it was very apparent in the show’s very first holiday episode, “Christmas at Plum Creek,” which originally aired on Dec. 25, 1974.
In the episode, the Ingalls family members earn money to buy Christmas gifts for one another. Near the end of the episode, the clan celebrates Christmas Eve with a night of fiddle playing and dancing in their humble Walnut Grove home. But Charles’ fiddle playing is way off, as cast members noted in a recent episode of The Little House on the Prairie 50th Anniversary podcast.
Podcast host Pamela Bob was the first to point out Landon’s lack of fiddle prowess. She asked co-hosts Alison Arngrim (Nellie Oleson on the show) and Dean Butler (Almanzo Wilder), “Now, why didn’t anyone tell Michael Landon? The air fiddle wasn't as obvious this time. It wasn't inches away, right? But his fingering on the… Why? Why, you guys?”
Butler chimed in to defend Landon. “Well, you know, my longtime feeling is that Michael could prioritize a lot of things and he did brilliantly, but that was not a priority for him,” he said. “If it had been a priority for him, it he would have done it beautifully.”
Actor Michael Landon on "Little House on the Prairie." (Photo by NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)Photo by NBC on Getty Images
Elsewhere on the podcast, Arngrim noted that sometimes Landon didn’t know what musical track his character would be playing to.
“They might have had a click track on the stage, just something for the rhythm of it, and you don't know what's being played,“ Butler added. “On the other hand, they could have very easily been gone on the stage with the fiddler and just said, you know, we're going to just do something nondescript and play something in this tempo and away they go. And then they would just do playback on the stage, and you'd hear it, and then you know so they're they could be dancing to something. But that doesn't explain Michael's fingering, sort of.”
Arngrim speculated, “Was it also a weird in-joke, like he wanted to see if we'd all notice?“
“If you've ever been around someone who plays, you know he's not playing," Butler noted. “I mean, it's like, you just know he's not playing. But you forgive him because the exuberance is wonderful and because it's Michael. You just accept it."
Landon, who died in 1991 at age 54, did not know how to play the fiddle in real life, but he did have some musical experience playing guitar, piano, and harmonica, according to ReMind magazine. The outlet noted that the Little House dad's fiddle music was added in later in post-production, and Landon just pretended to play while filming.
Fifty years later, Landon’s Little House on the Prairie fiddle is on display at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota.
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