East Tennessee Blues: A Song History
"East Tennessee Blues" is credited to the fiddler Charlie Bowman (1889–1962), and his biographer Bob Cox dates its composition to the 1920s.[1] Most accounts connect Bowman with Gray Station (today's Gray), near Johnson City, Tennessee.[2][3] He is said to have met Al Hopkins at a 1925 fiddlers' convention in Mountain City, Tennessee, and then joined Hopkins's band, the Hill Billies, who made records in New York for Vocalion and Brunswick.[2][3] The band recorded the tune with Bowman on fiddle, though sources disagree on whether that happened in 1926 or 1927.[1][3][4]
Detroit Publishing Co., “Chattanooga: the Tennessee River from Lookout Mountain,” photograph, c. 1902. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
According to Cox, Bowman had not given the tune a title before it was recorded, and the name came from Hopkins. Bowman was uneasy about calling it a blues, since the piece does not use a blues progression; several other so-called blues recorded in that period were really country rags as well.[1] West Virginia fiddler Reese Jarvis recorded the melody for Brunswick in Chicago in 1929 under the title "Poca River Blues," and the tune known as "Honeysuckle" or "Honeysuckle Rag" is considered a related melody.[1]
The tune is in C major, and fiddlers play it in standard tuning. Bluegrass fiddlers sometimes shift to second position to reach certain double stops.[1] Later recordings include those by Sandy Bradley (1979), the band Fiddle Fever (1981) and Mike Seeger (1988).[1] It is also one of the tunes in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[5]
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