Chattanooga: A Song History
"Chattanooga" is an old-time reel in G major that the Traditional Tune Archive traces to Blaine Smith, an east Tennessee musician born around 1914, who learned it in the 1920s from his father and from a player named Bob Douglas.[1] Smith's recording of it appears on Bottle of Wine and a Ginger Cake, an album issued on the Pine Breeze label as Pine Breeze 003.[1] Those recordings had their start in 1974, when Ron Williams, newly hired as a supervisor at the Pine Breeze Center, a mental-health facility for teenagers, began bringing groups of young people from the center, along with a reel-to-reel recorder, out to traditional musicians in the countryside around Chattanooga.[2] Smith was recorded in the field in 1977 by Williams and the Pine Breeze Traditional Music Project.[3]
Detroit Publishing Co., Chattanooga and the Tennessee River from Lookout Mountain, glass negative, between 1902 and 1920. Shown for the place name; it has no connection to the tune.
Fiddle-tune collections have since printed the tune, among them Stacy Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994) and the third volume of The Portland Collection (2015), and the archive gives it for fiddle in either standard tuning or the GDgd cross-tuning.[1] A tune titled "Chattanooga" appears in Mark Gilston's More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, a sheet-music collection of old-time American tunes that Gilston publishes himself.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Chattanooga".
- WUTC: "Ron Williams and The Pine Breeze Recording Project" (Scenic Sounds, 2025).
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Old Chattanooga".
- Mark Gilston: "More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer".
- Image: Detroit Publishing Co., Chattanooga and the Tennessee River from Lookout Mountain, glass negative, between 1902 and 1920. Library of Congress.