Blackberry Blossom: A Song History

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The “Blackberry Blossom” heard at bluegrass and old-time jams is tied to Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, the Tennessee fiddler who began playing on the Grand Ole Opry in 1927 and first recorded in 1935.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive relays a Smith family story, reported by Charles Wolfe and Barry Poss, that the piece had no name until Smith played it over WSM and the station held a contest to title it.[2] The sources consulted here disagree on the year of Smith’s own recording: the California Bluegrass Association places it with his Dixieliners, a group that included the Delmore Brothers, in 1935, while the Tune Archive gives an earlier date.[3][2] In its usual form the first strain sits in G major and the second turns toward E minor.[2]

Audubon print of two catbirds on a branch hung with blackberries and leaves

John James Audubon, Cat Bird, hand-colored etching, aquatint and engraving, 1827–38 (detail). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Its move into bluegrass came in the early 1960s, when the banjoist Bill Keith, a pioneer of the “melodic” approach to fiddle tunes, was playing with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys; a live Monroe performance with Keith survives from Culpeper, Virginia, in August 1963, and Monroe used the tune in his mandolin workshop at the 1965 Fincastle festival, though he never cut it in the studio.[3] Keith, Norman Blake and Tony Rice all recorded it later, Rice on his album Manzanita with David Grisman taking a mandolin break, and Mark O’Connor, Byron Berline and Doc Watson are among the many others who have put it on record.[3][2]

The name is shared by other melodies. An older Kentucky tune in G Dorian, the signature piece of the fiddler Ed Haley and recorded for Columbia in 1930 by the Kentucky fiddler Dick Burnett, has come to be called “Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom” to keep it apart from Smith’s later tune, which the Tune Archive regards as related to it.[4] An Irish reel called “The Blackberry Blossom” is a different tune again, found in Canon James Goodman’s mid-nineteenth-century Cork manuscripts and recorded by the Sligo fiddler James Morrison in 1936.[5] A “Blackberry Blossom” is among the jam tunes arranged in Stephen Seifert’s mountain dulcimer book Join the Jam II.[6]

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Sources

  1. National Fiddler Hall of Fame: "Arthur Smith Bio".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Blackberry Blossom (2)".
  3. California Bluegrass Association: "Blackberry Blossom".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Blackberry Blossom (4)".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Blackberry Blossom (1)".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".