Fueled by the ongoing revival, traditional fiddle and banjo music is available in quantities never seen before, whether in book collections or on the internet. Many of the books are labors of love, with tunes printed in musical notation intended to help perpetuate the music that has given such pleasure to musicians, dancers, and listeners over the years. Relatively few are scholarly productions, and almost none reflect musicological scholarship directed at fiddling in the early U.S. Republic to the Civil War, from which of course no contemporaneous recordings exist. Chris Goertzen’s American Antebellum Fiddling is at once a small collection of tunes for performance, and also one of the first musicological forays into this strange and frustrating historical soundscape. Goertzen, a professor of music history at the University of Southern Mississippi, understands that by necessity these early tune notations emphasize the literate side of this music tradition, while they largely overlook the oral tradition of fiddle/banjo dance music played by slaves, indentured servants, freedmen, itinerants, and river roustabouts; and on the frontier, in minstrel shows, and as entertainment in gambling and prostitution houses.
Goertzen divides his book into three parts. In the first, he introduces musical commonplace books from the early 1800s, concentrating on two books and the lives of their tune compilers: those by Arthur McArthur (b. 1790), from Limington, Maine, and Philander Seward (b. 1791), from Fishkill, New York. “How representative of the fiddling of their day were McArthur’s and Seward’s manuscripts and the early American publications on which they drew?” asks Goertzen (33), but he cannot really answer that question. Instead, he offers analysis of some of the tunes and their historical sources and analogs, leavened by rhetorical questions and an unflagging wit. He prints an ample selection in modern notation for the fiddler who wants to try them out. A few, like “Fisher’s Hornpipe” and “Flowers of Edinburgh,” remain in active repertoire among some fiddlers in the United States; most do not.
In the second part of this volume Goertzen examines the extensive manuscript tune collection/transcriptions of Charles M. Cobb (b. 1835) of Woodstock, Vermont, and William Sidney Mount (b. 1807) of Stony Brook, Long Island. Along with biographical information Goertzen provides tune-related histories as well as learned and delightful portraits of these eccentric characters who also were very accomplished musicians. Mount is better known as the skillful genre artist whose paintings of barn dances and African American fiddlers and banjo players and their instruments were among the most realistic of the entire century and have since become iconic (see Titon 2012). It is well documented that Mount learned and transcribed some tunes from the playing of African American musicians for his collection, especially from a freedman living in New York named Anthony Hannibal Clapp; yet Goertzen writes that of the thousands of tunes in his manuscripts, Mount identified only one with Clapp (77). Nonetheless, Goertzen reports that by the 1850s “we encounter indications that [most] fiddling was then associated with African Americans” (73). Were they playing the tunes in these Cobb and Mount manuscripts from New York and Vermont? We do not know, but Goertzen surmises that the answer is yes, although it would have been a selection of those most popular and well-known. Again, Goertzen offers a generous sampling of tunes for performance.
Highlights of the third part of the book are discussions of fiddling from Virginia, as encountered in the publication Virginia Reels (1839-1851) by George P. Knauff, and from a tune manuscript written by Armeanous Hamblen (b. 1875), who transcribed tunes that he recalled hearing his grandfather David Hamblen play that he (David) had supposedly learned in Virginia in the 1830s. In the latter we encounter a higher percentage of the odd-structured or "crooked" tunes that remain in oral tradition, but whether they were crooked by nature, or in David Hamblen's idiosyncratic performances, or because of Armeanous Hamblen's inability to notate music accurately, remains an open question. The Knauff publications were independently discovered in the last century by Goertzen and the late Alan Jabbour. Goertzen published a well-regarded book about Knauff’s Virginia Reels (2017), and here he returns, summarizing salient points about this tunebook that was arranged from melodies that Knauff had apparently captured from oral tradition. Goertzen conjectures that among Knauff’s source fiddlers were African Americans as well as blackface minstrel musicians.
Yet, the “published notation is not very helpful in reconstructing the sound of antebellum blackface minstrel fiddling,” while Virginia’s “black fiddlers . . . were taught by musical [slave] owners, or traveling violin tutors, or each other” and “would have enjoyed the Scottish component of British fiddling, since Scottish tunes and Scottish ways of performing seem to have been more rhythmically dense and varied” (151). Perhaps, but Goertzen leaves the reader to speculate about what they played for Black gatherings and their own amusement. Later in part three Goertzen discusses the Hamblen Collection, which is intriguing but “has remained something of a research hot potato due to intractable problems with the musical notation” leading to several speculative reconstructions of the tunes in a style recognizable in old-time fiddling today. Indeed, some of the tunes are variants of well-liked tunes played by contemporary old-time revivalists. Goertzen’s intelligent guesswork about the flawed transcriptions, tune structures, and fiddler idiosyncrasies cools the potato without eliminating the intrigue.
U.S. fiddling scholarship has come far since Samuel Bayard broke ground with Hill Country Tunes (1944). Bayard’s generation of scholars assumed that most fiddle melodies collected in the South and New England could be traced to Old World ancestors. Certainly, if one went by the commonplace books, private tune manuscripts, and published nineteenth-century tune collections alone that would be a reasonable conclusion. But the next generation of scholars, less invested in showing British Isles origins for this music, realized that these ancestors could not account for the majority of the fiddle melodies folklorists encountered in the twentieth century. The reasons were the influences upon them from Black dance music style and repertory, as well as the musicians' own interest in creating new tunes. African American fiddlers and banjo players, and to some extent American Indian fiddlers, must have picked up many of those Old World tunes and performed them for the entertainment of white people. But at the same time, I am certain that a distinctive African American fiddle tune style and repertory developed, and that this is not reflected in the tune collections Goertzen examines here. One can hear echoes of it in some of the Black string band recordings made early in the twentieth century (e.g., Lusk, Gribble and York at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcCnfttIQp4). It was influenced not so much by Euro-American music as by African music, particularly as played on the banjo—an instrument of African origin documented in the South and the Caribbean in the Colonial period. This banjo-driven dance music, with its off-beat accents on the short banjo string, sometimes in combination with the fiddle, would have been overheard by white musicians. Some must have found it fascinating, and a few doubtless attempted to learn it.
Out of this developed the white racist music of antebellum blackface minstrelsy, to be sure, but this black-white musical interchange/theft continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, especially in the South; and it affected not only local and regional repertoires but also fostered among white musicians an additional tune repertory and a much looser playing style, with different rhythms and melodic types, as well as variation and improvisation during performance. And it resulted in much of the appeal of this style and repertory to old-time musicians, then and now. Alan Jabbour located much of the African American fiddlers' distinctive style in the “swing” or “drive” of repeated off-beat bowing accents; and as a fiddler myself, I think Alan had it right. Despite the lack of evidence in the written record, and in this book, Goertzen does not shy away from asking questions in this vein; yet, faithful to the written record, he cannot go very far in answering them. For that, we must look elsewhere.
Works Cited
Bayard, Samuel. 1944. Hill Country Tunes. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society.
Goertzen, Chris. 2017. George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels and the History of American Fiddling. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Titon, Jeff Todd. 2012. "Music, Mediation, Sustainability: A Case Study on the Banjo." Folklore Forum. https://folkloreforum.net/2012/06/28/music-mediation-sustainability-a-case-study-on-the-banjo/#more-1147.
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[Review length: 1387 words • Review posted on December 9, 2021]