Coal Harbor Bend: A Song History

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"Coal Harbor Bend" is a reel known from the playing of Manon Campbell (1890–1987), a fiddler from Hallie in Letcher County, in southeastern Kentucky near the Virginia line.[1][2] Campbell learned it from his father's sister, Viney Campbell Lusk.[1][2] The Traditional Tune Archive, citing Jeff Titon, passes on a family story about the title: an uncle claimed to have heard the tune at dance after dance while rafting the Kentucky River by night, and only later learned that his raft had been circling in a slow whirlpool at a bend at Coal Harbor, which gave the tune its name.[1]

Ink and crayon drawing of a man sprawled on a small log raft on dark rippling water at night

George Bellows, On a Raft, pen and ink and brush and conté crayon, c. 1900–1923. Shown for the raft in the tune's naming story; it has no connection to the tune.

Campbell credited his style of fiddling to Will Christian, an older African-American dance fiddler born around 1872.[2] On a tape John Harrod made of him, Campbell talks about Christian and plays "Coal Harbor Bend," and another item on the play list is labelled "Cold Harbor Bend" in parentheses.[3] Bruce Greene recorded Campbell at Hallie on March 19, 1977, and again on March 19, 1980, at his ninetieth birthday party, and those tapes are now in Berea College's Bruce Greene Kentucky Fiddle Music Collection.[4][5] Campbell was recorded playing the reel in G major and, earlier, in G Mixolydian with the fiddle cross-tuned, and Titon printed a transcription from Greene's 1977 recording as No. 26 in Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (2001).[1]

Later players have recorded it as well, among them the Clack Mountain String Band on Songs for the Mountaintop (2006) and Jason Cade and Rob McMacken on Hog-Eyed Man 2 (2015).[1] Don Pedi includes it, in DGD tuning, in Simply Old Time Dulcimer, a tablature book of traditional old-time repertoire with demonstration audio.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Coal Harbor Bend"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Coal Harbor Bend".
  2. Traditional Tune Archive: "Biography: Manon Campbell".
  3. Berea College Special Collections and Archives: "JH-CT-012-001 A-B Play Lists" (John Harrod Kentucky Fiddle Music Collection).
  4. Berea College Special Collections and Archives: "Manon Campbell BG-CT-135 / 136, March 19, 1977".
  5. Berea College Special Collections and Archives: "Manon Campbell BG-CT-151 / 152, March 19, 1980".
  6. Don Pedi: "Simply Old Time Dulcimer".
  7. Image: George Bellows, On a Raft, pen and ink and brush and conté crayon, c. 1900–1923. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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