Green Valley Waltz: A Song History
"Green Valley Waltz" is an old-time American fiddle waltz in G major, and the Traditional Tune Archive notes that most of its sources lead back to the Tennessee fiddler Arthur Smith; the archive lists "Green Meadow Waltz" as a related melody.[1] Smith played and sang it for Mike Seeger in November 1957, at a session held in Kirk McGee's home outside Nashville, in one of the early efforts to record old-time players again, especially those who had made commercial records in the 1920s and 1930s.[2] Folkways issued the session in 1964 as Look! Who's Here: Old Timers of the Grand Ole Opry, an album shared by Smith and the McGee Brothers, Sam and Kirk.[3][2]
American painter, The Hudson River Valley near Hudson, New York, oil on canvas, ca. 1850. Shown for its green valley; it has no connection to the tune.
Seeger's note on the track points to something unusual: at the end of each verse Smith sings in harmony with his own fiddle, a device Seeger said he knew of in no other fiddler's playing.[2] The tune has also been printed in fiddle collections, among them The Fiddle Book (1967), with John Lewis of Heavener, Oklahoma, as its source, and Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1995), with Skip Gorman as its source; the Lazy Aces, who learned it from an Arthur Smith recording, put it on a 1986 album.[1]
Larry Conger includes a "Green Valley Waltz," described in the listing as a traditional American fiddle tune and noted as requiring a 1+ fret, in The Waltz Collection, fifteen waltzes in DAD tuning published by Fingers Of Steel.[4]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Green Valley Waltz".
- Smithsonian Folkways: "The McGee Brothers & Arthur Smith, FA 2379, liner notes".
- Smithsonian Folkways: "Look! Who's Here: Old Timers of the Grand Ole Opry".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, The Waltz Collection".
- Image: American painter, The Hudson River Valley near Hudson, New York, oil on canvas, ca. 1850. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.