Appalachian Fiddle Music: Featuring 43 Fiddlers and 188 of Their Tunes by Drew Beisswenger and Roy Andrade, with Scott Prouty

Abstract

Reviewed by: Appalachian Fiddle Music: Featuring 43 Fiddlers and 188 of Their Tunes by Drew Beisswenger and Roy Andrade, with Scott Prouty James Ruchala Appalachian Fiddle Music: Featuring 43 Fiddlers and 188 of Their Tunes. By Drew Beisswenger and Roy Andrade, with Scott Prouty. Fenton, MO: Mel Bay Publications, 2021. [212 p. ISBN 9781513466378 (paperback), $24.99; ISBN 9781513459936 (e-book), $19.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, map, tune indexes. This book is an attempt to provide “a well-rounded survey and exploration of the fiddle music of the Appalachian Region” of the United States (p. 5). The Appalachian region comprises all or part of thirteen states, though this book focuses on only six of those: Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Vir -ginia. The three authors present a brief bullet-point overview of the history and characteristics of the Appalachian fiddle tradition—also called “old-time fiddling.” The tradition started with the immigration of settlers from Great Britain into the region and absorbed the [End Page 89] influence of Native Americans, German immigrants, African American musicians, and published popular and spiritual music. The radio and recording industries popularized some fiddlers early in the twentieth century. In the middle of the twentieth century, surviving culture-bearers became teachers to generations of revivalists both within and without the region. The broad outlines of this history will be well known to most practitioners of old-time fiddling, and this book does not seek to make a broader interpretation of that history. What it does do is delve into the technical and musical detail of what these fiddle players were doing, as far as can be determined from extant recorded performances. The bulk of the book is dedicated to chapters on six Appalachian states, with sections on six to nine representative fiddlers from each state. Old-time music has been recorded in several different contexts, and this book includes musicians from each of them. There are some of the legends of the early recording era, like John Carson, Lowe Stokes, and Charlie Bowman; some whose influence comes to us mainly through field recordings made by researchers or family members, including John M. Salyer, Henry Reed, Bill Stepp, and Luther Strong; and some of the revival-era mentors like Tommy Jarrell, Melvin Wine, and Clyde Daven-port. West Virginia’s Clark Kessinger was a recording artist in the 1920s who lived into the revivalist era. Some figures are lesser known but just as worthy of study, including Emma Lee Dickerson, Osey Helton, and Sarah Singleton. One of the lessons to be derived from this book is the strength of the tradition and the high level of artistry to be found in all these contexts. Roy Andrade offers a short overview of the history of fiddling in each state and a capsule biography of each of the musicians. The bulk of the book—and the collection’s real value—comprises Drew Beisswenger’s detailed transcriptions of the tunes as played by these historic musicians, along with analytical notes. Each transcription includes references to help find the specific recording from which it was made. Most of the performances are from old commercial recordings on 78-rpm records or from field recordings. Many have not been reissued commercially but can be found for streaming or purchase on the internet, and the authors helpfully provide resources for locating these recordings. Most transcriptions of recordings fall somewhere between strictly descriptive and prescr iptive, while the quality and detail of the transcriptions is better than I’ve seen in comparable works. Having done some transcriptions of fiddling, I know that it can be both frustrating and enlightening. Most often, one hears more in the music than can be put on paper. Beisswengers’s transcriptions include many more details of ornamentation than found in comparable books like Jeff Todd Titon’s Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001) and Miles Krassens’s Masters of Old-Time Fiddling (New York: Oak Publications, 1983), both of which the authors acknowledge as influential. In some cases, the gap between what can be heard and what is notated begins to show. Benton Flippen’s frequent use of slides is...