Boatin' Up Sandy: A Song History

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The Big Sandy River runs along the Kentucky–West Virginia line to the Ohio at Catlettsburg, and from the 1830s until World War II steamboats and flat-bottomed pushboats worked it, alongside log rafts floated down to market; after a railroad reached the valley in the late 1880s, coal became its main business.[1] Fiddlers in that region and beyond attached the name "Boatin' Up Sandy" to several different tunes, and the Traditional Tune Archive gives six separate entries under the title.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

1865 photograph of the river steamboat Highlander tied up at a riverbank

Partridge’s Gallery, steamboat “Highlander,” bound for Parkersburg, carte de visite, 1865. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The oldest dated version in the sources consulted here is a G-major reel printed in Thomas and Leeder's The Singin' Gathering (1939), noted from a harmonica player, Zeff Burgess, who played it in June 1911 while logging near the head of the Big Sandy.[2] Kentucky fiddler Clyde Davenport had that tune in his repertory and recorded it for County in 1986.[2] An A-major reel with the same title went on record for Brunswick in 1926, played by Al Hopkins & His Buckle Busters, whose fiddlers included Tony Alderman and Charlie Bowman of East Tennessee; the Library of Congress recorded a related version from Osey and Ernest Helton in 1941.[3]

In West Virginia, Wilson Douglas of Clay County played a modal A version he learned from French Carpenter, and named a 1989 album after it, while Melvin Wine of neighboring Braxton County had a different tune under the same title.[4][5] In eastern Kentucky, Owen "Snake" Chapman credited Thaddeus Baker of Jenkins as his source and recorded his version in A on Fiddle Ditty (June Appal, 1990) and Walnut Gap (Rounder, 1995).[6] The tune appears in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[8]

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Sources

  1. e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia: "Big Sandy River".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Boatin' Up Sandy (1)".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Boating Up Sandy (4)".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Boating Up Sandy (3)".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Boating Up Sandy (5)".
  6. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Boating Up Sandy (2)".
  7. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Boating Up Sandy (6)".
  8. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".