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Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection
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Item Title
Salt River
Alternate Title(s)
Salt Creek
Author/Creator
Collector: Jabbour, Alan
Performer: Reed, Henry; fiddle
Created/Published
August 27, 1966
Reed family home, Glen Lyn, Virginia (Giles County)
Notes
"Salt River" probably refers to the river of that name in Kentucky. Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys recorded this fiddle tune in 1964 under the title "Salt Creek" (Decca 31596), modifying the original name in honor of the creek in Indiana near where Monroe held his annual Bean Blossom Festival. Monroe's banjoist, Bill Keith, apparently got the tune originally from West Virginia banjoist Don Stover. The Monroe recording has given the tune a new lease on life on the bluegrass circuit. Henry Reed's set is melodically fairly simple, suggesting the possibility that the tune was usually played as a banjo tune. He begins on the high strain, as does Hobart Smith of Saltville, Virginia, in a 1956 recording called "The Pateroller Song" (on "Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians", Tradition TLP 1007) that sounds similar. The tune's distribution seems to have been limited to Virginia and West Virginia before its bluegrass diffusion in the later decades of the twentieth century. See additional discussion and citations under "Muddy Roads" in "The Hammons Family" (Library of Congress, AFS L65-66). As a tune, "Salt River" is a scion of the large family of tunes best represented by the Irish and American reel "Paddy on the Turnpike" (see Bayard, "Hill Country Tunes", #31 for comparative references).
Key: A
Meter: 4/4
Strains: 2 (high-low, 4-4)
Rendition: 1r-2r-1r-2r-1r-2
Phrase Structure: ABAC QRQS (abcd abef qrst qruf)
Compass: 12
Stylistic features: Fewer sixteenth notes, more eighth notes.
Recording chronology: 047
Related Tune(s): The Pateroller Song
Related Tune(s): Paddy on the Turnpike
Related Tune(s): Muddy Roads
Duration: 1 minute, 26 seconds
Subject
Breakdowns
Reels
Fiddle tunes
Instrumentals--fiddle
Ethnography
Music
United States--Virginia--Giles County--Glen Lyn
Object Type
Medium
sound recording
Language
English
Call Number
AFC LWO 5031 reel 5A, AFS 13035A:36
Digital ID
afcreed 13035a36
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afcreed.13035a36