Elk River Blues: A Song History
"Elk River Blues" has a known composer: Ernie Carpenter, a fiddler from Braxton County, West Virginia, who died in 1997.[1][2] His forebears reached the Elk River in the late 1700s, as some of the earliest European-American settlers in the middle of present-day West Virginia, and the tunes Ernie played reached back through five generations of family fiddlers.[2] In the mid-twentieth century the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Elk at Sutton, and the water flooded the old family homeplace, a loss the West Virginia Encyclopedia says Carpenter never got past.[1][2] In Carpenter's own account, quoted by the Traditional Tune Archive, the tune came to him one day when he was feeling low and picked up the fiddle.[1]
William Henry Jackson, “Crossing the Elk, West Virginia,” photograph, Detroit Publishing Co., ca. 1892. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
The melody is in G major and is taken slower than a breakdown, at a brisk walking pace.[1] Carpenter received West Virginia's Vandalia Award in 1988,[3] and Augusta Heritage issued an album of his fiddling titled Elk River Blues.[1][2] The tune has since traveled far from Braxton County: it is printed in the Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes (2011), and the Reed Island Rounders recorded it on Goin' Home (2002).[1] It is also one of the tunes in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer book Join the Jam II.[4]
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