Folding Down The Sheets: A Song History

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"Folding Down the Sheets" is a D-major reel known in southwestern Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky, fiddled either in standard tuning or in ADae.[1] Most versions heard today go back to the fiddling of Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia.[1] Folklorists Alan Jabbour and Karen Singer Jabbour recorded him playing it at his family home in Giles County on June 18, 1966, and their fieldnotes spell the title "Foldin' Down the Sheets."[2] Reed told them he had it from Quince Dillion, John Dillion and a fiddler named Falls.[2] The tune was not Reed's alone, though: Wyatt Insko had already recorded a separate set from Floyd Burchett in Pike County, Kentucky, in 1954.[1]

Edouard Vuillard lithograph of two women folding a large sheet of linen

Édouard Vuillard, Folding the Linen, lithograph, 1893. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The melody has relatives with much older paper trails. According to the Traditional Tune Archive, a comparable tune was printed as "Republican Spirit" in George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels (1839), and it turns up as "Missouri Hornpipe" in Elias Howe's mid-nineteenth-century collections.[1] In Barren County, Kentucky, it went by "Hanging Out the Sheets," and the Canadian fiddler Don Messer played a cousin called "Mackilmoyle Reel" whose second part is the closest match.[1] The same source cites Jim Taylor's view that the tune, under one name or another, was already widespread among musicians on both sides by the 1860s, while also warning that some tunes sharing the title seem to be separate pieces.[1]

The Library of Congress counts it among a handful of tunes it calls perhaps "the quintessential fiddle tunes of the old frontier."[3] Jabbour's recordings of Reed are now held by the Library's American Folklife Center, which observes that a good number of his tunes found new players once the old-time fiddle revival took hold in the late 1900s.[4] Stephen Seifert includes it in his mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[5]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Folding Down the Sheets".
  2. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "Folding Down the Sheets" (Henry Reed, 1966).
  3. Library of Congress: "The Historical and Cultural Significance of Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier".
  4. Library of Congress: "Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection" (About this Collection).
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".