Breaking Up Christmas: A Song History
In the Blue Ridge along the North Carolina–Virginia line, "Breaking Up Christmas" is the name of both a season and a tune. For twelve days starting on Christmas, people went from house to house visiting neighbors, with music and dancing at each stop. The custom was strongest around Round Peak, near Mount Airy, North Carolina, and around Galax, Virginia.[1] The holiday ended on January 6, known as Old Christmas.[2] Tom Carter and Blanton Owen, writing in 1978, called the tune a favorite in the triangle formed by Galax, Meadows of Dan and Mount Airy.[3] Virginia fiddler Lawrence Bolt, born in 1894, remembered it as the tune for the season's final dance.[2][3] Mike Yates wrote in 2002 that around Galax it was traditionally saved for dances held on Old Christmas.[3]
Winslow Homer, Christmas Belles, wood engraving from Harper’s Weekly, January 2, 1869. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Singers set verses to the tune about holiday merrymaking and dancing.[3] The musician most closely tied to it is Round Peak fiddler Tommy Jarrell (1901–1985),[2][4] who in 1982 received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.[5] His playing of it has been issued on several albums, among them a 2009 Field Recorders' Collective volume.[3] Other recordings include ones by Leftwich & Higginbotham and the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, and John McCutcheon's 1984 album Winter Solstice.[3]
The tune is in A major, and fiddlers often cross-tune to AEae for it.[3][4] Jarrell's version was printed in David Brody's The Fiddler's Fakebook (1983).[4] The name has outlived the house parties: the Surry Arts Council in Mount Airy has staged a Breaking Up Christmas music program in early January at the town's Earle Theatre.[1] The tune is also in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[6]
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