In your opinion, what tune would qualify as one of the oldest Appalachian reels? (pre 1850)

Posted - 02/08/2010 :  10:03:28        

Soldier's Joy...

--OTJ

Posted - 02/08/2010 :  10:58:30        

Welcome Linda G!

Bonaparte's Retreat?

Brian

Posted - 02/08/2010 :  12:42:29  

A.L. Lloyd, the English folksong scholar, once wrote about tracing "Soldier's Joy," in manuscript, to the late 1500's.

Posted - 02/08/2010 :  14:48:02      

Love Somebody or (too young to marry) and Stony Point are up in age too. Money Musk is pre 1850s, Cold Frosty Morn, Betty Likkens, and George Booker or (Camp Chase) are also old.

Posted - 02/08/2010 :  14:56:47        

Leendah,
Are you talking about tunes that did not come from the old world? So far almost all the tunes mentioned go back to the British Isles.
Carl

Posted - 02/08/2010 :  18:02:37        

(heh-heh) So did anyone see that Super Bowl commercial? You know, the one with the beaver?

Edited by - bsed on 02/08/2010 18:03:22

Posted - 02/08/2010 :  18:05:27  

It must have been a ground hog, not a beaver. Beaver's can't play "Soldier's Joy" that well. You can see again on msnbc.com.

Posted - 02/08/2010 :  18:08:44        

Oh shucks...I didn't see that thread below "Best Super Bowl Ever".
Sorry

Posted - 02/08/2010 :  19:31:49  

Ohhh! Mea culpa! I just watched the ad again and it is a beaver! Who knew?

Posted - 02/10/2010 :  05:02:27        

Trying to think of the oldest Appalachian reels that are not tunes from the old world, I like to make a first suggestion. Melvin Wine played a tune called "Jump Jim Crow". Now that tune, and song, was actually published as sheet music in 1828 under the title "Jimmy Crow" or "Jim Crow". Supposedly Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice (an early black face minstrel; 1806-1860) got the suggestion for the title, tune and dance step from overhearing an old black slave.

Here are some references to Daddy Rice and this song:
http://www.ferris.edu/JIMCROW/who.htm
http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/histo...reating2.htm
You can find more references by searching "Daddy Rice" in Google

I have a copy of the sheet music from:
Series of Old American Songs
Reproduced in facsimile from original or early editions in the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays
Brown University
With brief annotations by S. Foster Damon, curator
Brown University Library
Providence, R.I., 1936

You can a copy of sheet music for this song at:
http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/

Edited by - carlb on 02/10/2010 05:14:40

Posted - 02/10/2010 :  09:02:41      

Here are a few more old reels, not sure if they go back to the old country or not.
Ducks on the pond
Salt River
Jenny put the kettle on
Walkin in the Parlor
Boatman
Jimmy Sutton
Kitchen Girl
Shortnin Sread
Jordan am a hard road to travel
Old Dan Tucker

Posted - 02/10/2010 :  09:40:00          

quote:

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Originally posted by coelhoe

Ohhh! Mea culpa! I just watched the ad again and it is a beaver! Who knew?

---

Posted - 02/10/2010 :  10:30:33      

Yes, it would be good to know if Leendah was looking for tunes native to America, or brought from the old world. I'd suggest "Arkansas Traveler," "Eighth of January" and "Forked Deer" as old ones. I wonder how old the "Granny Won't Your Dog Bite" family of tunes is too.

For transplants "Leather Britches" (based on "Lord MacDonald's Reel") "Miss McLeod's Reel," "Too Young to Marry," "Speed the Plough," "The Old Ark's a Moving" (as "The Two [or Twin] Sisters") were all in American printed collections before 1850.

I have a guitar tutor from 1833, with tunes in the back, and its surprising to realize that before the time of Stephen Foster, most songs were European imports, other than some hymns.

Edited by - DougD on 02/10/2010 10:31:47

Posted - 02/10/2010 :  11:52:58    

One of the cool things about some tunes is that their age is usually speculation...
Because American fiddling is rooted in "Europe" the tunes and the tune forms always hearken back to the "old country." So to even classify a tune as uniquely American/Appalachian is sometimes hard to do. What I find fascinating is that when collectors first started collecting tunes and songs in the Appalachians, they found shared "old country" names yet completely different melodies at times connected with the words or titles. It gets even harder to even classify certain tunes as "Scottish" or "Irish" or "English" in the old country as well.

Also tunes travelled pretty quickly. A tune that comes to mind is "Such a Gettin Upstairs" which seems to be uniqely American, yet was also found being played and sung in England in the early 1900s or before with some speculation about English Morris roots.

from fiddlers companion-----

... An early version of the tune was published by George P. Knauff in his Virginia Reels, volume IV (Baltimore, 1839). Samuel Bayard (1981) thinks the tune may have originated as a stage or vaudeville number, and indeed, it was adopted by American minstrels and was first published as a minstrel song in the 1830's. It was in the repertoire of minstrel Thomas "Daddy" Rice and Sigmund Spaeth reports it was sung by P.T. Barnum in black-face. The minstrel publication mentions its interpretor as "Mr. Bob Farrell, the Original Zip Coon." The song was said by Brown to have been featured by one Barney Burns, a low comedian connected with a rural travelling circus in the mid-nineteenth century. Several writers, beginning with Winston Wilkinson (Southern Folklore Quarterly, Vol. VI, No. 1, March 1942, “Virginia Dance Tunes”), have found that “Such a Getting Upstairs” is derived from the morris dance tune “Getting Upstairs,” collected by Cecil Sharp and published in 1909.

The tune is probably the "Getting Upstairs" mentioned in a 1931 account of a LaFollette, northeast Tenn., fiddlers contest. It is similar to West Virginia fiddler French Carpenter's "Shelvin' Rock." The title appears in a list of traditional Ozark Mountain fiddle tunes compiled by musicologist/folklorist Vance Randolph, published in 1954. Wilkinson finds a variant of the melody as a play-party tune collected in Indiana, and in similar use by children in Liverpool, England (where they sing a rhyme beginning “Up the streets and down the streets,” which Wilkinson sees as a possible morris dance relic). North Georgia fiddler Clayton McMichen, recording with the Skillet Lickers for Columbia in 1929 (No. 15472), sang the song as “Never Seen the Like Since Getting’ Upstairs.” The English collector Cecil Sharp made a cylindar recording of this tune in 1909 of the playing of English musician John Locke, Leominster, Hereford, described as a “gipsy fiddler”

I can think of numerous examples of similar tunes.

Posted - 02/10/2010 :  12:35:43          

Wind that Shakes the Barley and Temperance (aka Teetotallers) reel are both Irish reels that got played a lot
this side of the Atlantic by Old Time fidders at one time. I heard a field recording of some old fellow from the mountains playing Temperance Reel.
Miss McLeod's (Miss McCloud's, Uncle Joe) Reel was written by Niel Gow in the mid 1700's, and has obviously gotten popular over here too.
Leather Breeches is really Lord McDonald's Reel, and is quite old, IIRC.

But yeah, Soldier's Joy (if it was actually originally a reel) has GOT to be up at the top or near it.

Posted - 02/11/2010 :  00:11:27      

Shawn, you know, the notation for "Such a Getting Upstairs" in Knauff's Virginia Reels seems to me quite different from the other tunes in the collection. It looks like it might be imitating a banjo. Interesting. I don't know the French Carpenter tune well enough to tell if its related or not.

Posted - 02/11/2010 :  05:15:09        

quote:

---

Originally posted by DougD

Shawn, you know, the notation for "Such a Getting Upstairs" in Knauff's Virginia Reels seems to me quite different from the other tunes in the collection. It looks like it might be imitating a banjo. Interesting. I don't know the French Carpenter tune well enough to tell if its related or not.

---

Posted - 02/11/2010 :  08:23:44    

I was wondering if there was a possibility it started here and migrated to England since it appears in print here earlier than it does in England. (at least from what i found)
If I had to bet though, id say we got it from England....

Posted - 02/11/2010 :  08:36:27    

Cumberland Gap came to mind but its hard to get a date on it. Nice little article on it though---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumber...folk_song%29

Posted - 02/11/2010 :  09:14:12        

Dunno if this will help at all, but it seems to be a good list of popular music from around 1800 -1850.
http://www.pdmusic.org/1800s.html
Some pretty amusing midi to listen to as well. Virginia Reels are listed, and The Cottage Reel. Minstrel groups traveled to Europe at the height of their popularity, and was played in England for the Queen. Joel Walker Sweeney and Christy's Minstrels both went to England.

While I'm sure a lot of our reels came originally from Europe, by the time recording was possible, they had changed so much that they are now ours! Kind of like how the British took our blues music and sold it back to us as "The British Invasion" in the 1960's!

Posted - 02/11/2010 :  11:36:07    

Even though I think we may never answer the original question in this thread, its one that makes me think a lot and i was reminded of a western Maryland tune called "Hang On." Which the "name" is at least very old....

From fiddlers companion:
HANG ON. Old#8209;Time, Breakdown. D Major. Standard tuning. AABB. "A thoroughly characteristic western Pennsylvania fiddle tune, unmistakably British in character, and composed#8209;#8209;like many others#8209;#8209;in such a way that the whole point of the melody lies in the recurring cadential formula. See Ford, p. 91, 'Old Mother Logo', for an air resembling this in a general way" (Bayard). There is no way to tell how old this tune might be, but an enticingly similar title appears in an account of 18th century weddings on the frontier, unearthed by Paul Gifford. In 1876 there appeared a volume written by one Joseph Doddridge, entitled "Notes on the settlement and Indian wars of the western parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, from 1763 to 1783, inclusive : together with a view of the state of society, and manners of the first settlers of the western country” (Edited by A. Williams, published in Albany, N. Y., by J. Munsell, 1876), where on pg. 155 he states:
***
[Desciption of weddings]. After dinner the dancing commenced, and generally lasted till the next morning. The figures of the dances were three and four handed reels, or square sets, and jigs. The commencement was always a square four, which was followed by what was called jigging it off; that is, two of the four would single out for a jig, and were followed by the remaining couple. The jigs were often accompanied with what was called cutting out; that is, when either of the parties became tired of the dance, on intimation, the place was supplied by some one of the company without any interruption of the dance. In this way a dance was often continued till the musician was heartily tired of his situation. Toward the latter part of the night, if any of the company, through weariness, attempted to conceal themselves for the purpose of sleeping, they were hunted up, paraded on the floor, and the fiddler ordered to play "Hang on till to-morrow morning." Source for notated version: Irvin Yaugher Jr., Mt. Independence, Pennsylvania, October 19, 1943 (learned from his grandfather) [Bayard]. Bayard (Hill Country Tunes), 1944; No. 95.

I know another version of "Hang On" which is sometimes called "Old Hang On." I first heard this tune from western md/wv/ fiddlers Jim Hollis and Larry Rush (now deceased.) Jimmie Triplett recorded some of Hollis's tunes.

Larry Rush didnt tell me the name of it, yet I could tell it was a variant of Hollis's "Old Hang On." The "Hang On" tunes are also related to the tune "Phoebe Ice."

There is also a reference to this tune name in an old book I have on disc somewhere called "The History of Western Maryland."