Fortune: A Song History

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"Fortune" is a D-major breakdown, fiddled in standard tuning or in ADae, and also known as "Once I Had a Fortune."[1] The Traditional Tune Archive calls it a Blue Ridge standard found in western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia, and links it above all with the string bands of the Galax and Hillsville area.[1] Tommy Jarrell (1901–1986) of Mount Airy, North Carolina, remembered his father playing it for as long as he could recall and described it as a tune for flat-foot dancing.[1][2] The same archive notes that it closely resembles a song, "I'll Never Get Drunk Anymore," collected from Black singers in East Tennessee in 1905, and points to the related "Sugar Hill" tune family.[1]

1937 photograph of five members of the Bog Trotters Band of Galax, Virginia, with their instruments

The Bog Trotters Band, Galax, Virginia, 1937: Doc Davis, Crockett Ward, Uncle Alex Dunford, Wade Ward and Fields Ward. Photograph by a CBS photographer. Lomax Collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The Galax fiddler Emmett Lundy recorded it, and the recordings listed in The Fiddler's Companion include the Bogtrotters of Galax, Otis Burris, the Camp Creek Boys and Fred Cockerham on the Rounder album High Atmosphere.[2] Jarrell's own version came out on County Records' Pickin' on Tommy's Porch in 1984, and later recordings range from the Backwoods Band's Jes' Fine (1980) to Bruce Molsky's Lost Boy (1996).[2] One clawhammer banjo teaching site calls it one of the iconic tunes of the Round Peak tradition and teaches it in double-D tuning.[3]

Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II includes two entries, "Fortune" and "Fortune - Round Peak."[4] Seifert's page does not explain how the two differ, though he notes that he sometimes included more than one version of a tune.[4] The sources consulted here describe only one American old-time tune by this name, so the two entries are probably two settings of it rather than two different tunes, but this could not be confirmed. Kuntz's tune collection Ragged but Right likewise printed two versions, one of them Jarrell's.[2]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Fortune (1)".
  2. Andrew Kuntz, The Fiddler's Companion (ibiblio): "Forked Buck" to "Fot…" entries, incl. "Fortune [1]".
  3. Learn Clawhammer Banjo: "Clawhammer Core Repertoire Series: 'Fortune'".
  4. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".