Avalon Quickstep: A Song History
“Avalon Quickstep” is named for Avalon, Mississippi.[1] It comes from the fiddler Willie Narmour (1889–1961) and the guitarist Shell Smith (1895–1968), a Carroll County duo whose “Carroll County Blues” was among the best-selling records of 1929.[2] Narmour and Smith recorded for OKeh from 1928 to 1930, with sessions in cities that included New York and San Antonio, and remade some of their tunes for Bluebird in 1934.[3] The Traditional Tune Archive dates the first recording of “Avalon Quickstep” to their San Antonio session of June 1930, issued on OKeh.[1] In later life Narmour stayed in Avalon, where he ran a garage, drove a school bus and farmed.[2][3]
Carol M. Highsmith, “Dirt road near Avalon in Carroll County, Mississippi,” photograph, 2016. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A modern view near the town the tune is named for.
The same town gave its name to Mississippi John Hurt’s “Avalon Blues,” and the two acts were connected. Hurt sometimes played guitar with Narmour at local dances, and Narmour put him forward to OKeh, which recorded Hurt in 1928.[3][4] The shared title reflects a shared home town, however; none of the sources consulted here connects the two melodies.
The tune is a reel in D with an irregular second strain of ten bars.[1] It is printed in fiddle collections such as Brody’s Fiddler’s Fakebook (1983) and the second volume of Phillips’s Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1995).[1] Stephen Seifert’s mountain dulcimer book Join the Jam II, a collection of tunes common at old-time jams, includes it.[5]
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