Ducks On The Millpond: A Song History
"Ducks on the Millpond" is an old-time reel from southwest Virginia and the Mount Airy area of North Carolina, usually played in D with the fiddle's bottom string tuned up to A (ADae).[1] Most of the versions in circulation today trace to Emmett Lundy (1864–1953) of Grayson County, Virginia, whose chief influence was Greenbury "Green" Leonard, a local fiddler who was already old when Lundy learned from him in the 1880s and 1890s.[1] Alan Lomax collected the tune in 1937 from Fields Ward of Galax, and guessed it was kin to "Old Dan Tucker."[1] In August 1941 Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded Lundy at Galax for the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song, and that session was issued in 1977 on the LP Fiddle Tunes from Grayson County, Virginia (String STR 802), with "Ducks on the Millpond" among its tracks.[1][2]
The Old Grist Mill, lithograph, Haskell & Allen, 19th century. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Lundy played it in three parts, the third a variation on the second, while other transcriptions give it two.[1] Names drift as well: southwest Virginia fiddler Joe Caudill knew it as "Geese on the Millpond," and the Traditional Tune Archive points readers to "Deaf Woman's Courtship" too.[1] It is mostly an instrumental. Lundy did not sing it, but verses are sometimes added, and the Archive prints some, among them a set credited to Tommy Jarrell of Mount Airy, North Carolina.[1]
Jarrell recorded it on June Apple (Mountain 302, 1972) with Kyle Creed, Audine Lineberry and Bobby Patterson, and the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, who learned it from him, put it on Summer Oaks and Porch (Rounder 0035, 1973).[1] It also appears in print in collections such as Brody's Fiddler's Fakebook (1983) and Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994).[1] Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer book Join the Jam II includes it alongside "Ducks on the Pond," which is a separate tune.[3][4]
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