Greasy Coat: A Song History

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"Greasy Coat" comes from the Hammons family of central West Virginia. The earliest recording of it found in the sources consulted here dates from August 1947, when the folklorist Louis Watson Chappell set up a handmade disc recorder and recorded the fiddler Edden Hammons in Webster County.[1][2] Those discs are now in Chappell's archive at West Virginia University Libraries. West Virginia University Press reissued them in 1999 as The Edden Hammons Collection, where the tune is titled "Old Greasy Coat."[2] A university museum exhibit also presents a sung "Greasy Coat" from the 1947 sessions, in which the singer lists one vice after another that he avoids.[1]

1938 photograph of two men with pike poles pushing logs across a mill pond toward a West Virginia sawmill

Marion Post Wolcott, “Pushing the logs toward the sawmill, Erwin, West Virginia,” photograph, September 1938. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The tune lived on in the family. Burl Hammons (1908–1993) of Pocahontas County played it, and his version is the one the Traditional Tune Archive transcribes, from The Hammons Family (Rounder, 1998).[3] That two-CD set drew on field sessions recorded from 1970 to 1973 by Alan Jabbour, Carl Fleischhauer and Dwight Diller with Burl, Maggie Hammons Parker, Sherman Hammons and others. It combined the Library of Congress's 1973 double album with a companion Rounder LP.[4] The family's music had many sources. The Appalachian Forest National Heritage Area credits Black players, among them the Braxton County musician Grafton Lacy, as the source of much of what Burl and Currence Hammons played.[5]

The heritage-area writers single out "Greasy Coat" as an example of the cross-tunings and unusual scales that run through the Hammons repertoire.[5] It is a three-part reel in A, listed as both Dorian and Mixolydian. Fiddlers play it in standard tuning or cross-tuned to AEae.[3] The sources consulted here do not settle what the title means. The Tune Archive suggests a fleece still slick with lanolin, or a soldier's coat worn filthy with use.[3] The tune has reached jam tunebooks. It is printed in Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994) and the third volume of The Portland Collection (2015),[3] and it is one of the tunes in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer book Join the Jam II.[6]

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Sources

  1. West Virginia University, Watts Museum: "Timber/Timbre: Falling Trees and Rising Voices, Section II: Community".
  2. Penn Libraries catalog: "The Edden Hammons collection".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Greasy Coat".
  4. Library of Congress, Folklife Today: "Memories of Alan Jabbour in the Field: Visiting the Hammons Family".
  5. Appalachian Forest National Heritage Area: "Grafton Lacy and the Hammons Family: The Multicultural Roots of Old-Time Music".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".