Antelope Gap: A Song History

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"Antelope Gap" is the opening track of The Old Texas Fiddle, Vol. I, a 2013 album credited to Howard Rains and released on the Bandcamp page of Spencer & Rains, his duo with Tricia Spencer.[1] Rains, a sixth-generation Texan, made the album to preserve an older Texas fiddle style that Texas Monthly describes as popular between the Civil War and World War II, played more for socializing than for show, and later eclipsed by western swing and contest fiddling.[2] He learned some of its tunes in person, two of them from the Nacogdoches fiddler Stafford Harris, who died in 2010, and for the series he gathered home recordings kept by the families of earlier Texas fiddlers.[2][3] A 2019 FolkWorks review of the third volume counts "Antelope Gap" among the tunes from the first two albums that have since become standards at old-time jam sessions in many places, California in particular.[3]

Color lithograph of a pronghorn antelope's head and curved horns against grass and a pale sky

Allen & Ginter, Prong-Horn Antelope, from the Wild Animals of the World series of cigarette cards, color lithograph, 1888. Shown for its pronghorn; it has no connection to the tune.

Sources differ on which Texas fiddler the tune came from.[3][4] The FolkWorks review lists it as "Stafford Harris' Antelope Gap," and gives Harris's dates as 1927–2010.[3] Dan Levenson, who learned the tune from the Old Texas Fiddle recording, writes in his tune notes that Rains traces it instead to the Texas fiddler J. W. Whatley, and that it has caught on with jam players in Tucson.[4] Mark Gilston includes it in More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, a book of sheet music collecting old-time American tunes.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Antelope Gap"

Sources

  1. Spencer & Rains (Bandcamp): "The Old Texas Fiddle Vol. I".
  2. Texas Monthly: "Reviving Old-Style Texas Fiddling".
  3. FolkWorks: "Spencer & Rains – The Old Texas Fiddle Vol. 3".
  4. Dan Levenson: "About the Tunes!".
  5. Mark Gilston: "More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer".
  6. Image: Allen & Ginter, Prong-Horn Antelope, from the Wild Animals of the World series of cigarette cards, color lithograph, 1888. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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