Grumbling Old Man, Growling Old Woman: A Song History
Many players now know "Grumbling Old Man, Growling Old Woman" from New England contra dances, but the Traditional Tune Archive identifies it as a reel from Québec.[1] Under its various names, among them "The Growling Old Man and Grumbling Old Woman," "Growling Old Man and Cackling Old Woman," and the French "La Marmotteuse," it belongs to a family of Québec fiddle tunes that set low, growling passages against high ones.[1] According to the archive, such tunes are "often meant to be representative of a couple having an argument."[1] The archive places the tune in A, with its first part Dorian and its second Mixolydian.[1]
John Vachon, Old couple farming in the Ozark Mountains. Missouri, photograph, 1940. Shown in fun for the tune's title; the couple have no connection to it.
The archive says it was Don Messer who made the tune popular as "The Growling Old Man and Grumbling Old Woman."[1] A fiddler and band leader born in New Brunswick in 1909, Messer formed his Islanders after joining CFCY in Charlottetown in 1939 and later headlined CBC Television's Don Messer's Jubilee.[2] A separate archive entry, "The Old Man and the Old Woman," gives a setting from Prince Edward Island player Lorin Simmons, dated there to the 1930s and printed in Samuel Bayard's Dance to the Fiddle, March to the Fife (1981), and lists the growling-and-grumbling title as another name for it.[3] The archive dates the adoption of Messer's version by revival fiddlers to the early 1970s, and from there it settled into the standard repertoire of New England contra dances.[1] Louis Beaudoin recorded it for Philo in 1973 as "Growling Old Man and the Cackling Old Woman," and the archive's note on that recording says the tune was heard on a Don Messer radio show in the 1950s.[1]
Smithsonian Folkways included it on the 1999 anthology Mademoiselle, voulez-vous danser?, played by Vermont fiddler Ronald West (born 1925) with David Carr on guitar.[4] The album's notes trace West's version to his father, a fiddler who played regularly for contra dances in northern Vermont.[4] Butch Ross includes it in A minor, in DAD tuning, in 13 More Great Tunes That Seriously (Almost) Nobody Plays, a Fingers Of Steel collection of seldom-heard tunes that comes with Ross's own demo recordings.[5]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "The Growling Old Man and Grumbling Old Woman".
- The Canadian Encyclopedia: "Don Messer and His Islanders".
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Old Man and the Old Woman (2)".
- Smithsonian Folkways: "Mademoiselle, voulez-vous danser? Franco-American Music from the New England Borderlands" (liner notes).
- Fingers Of Steel: "Butch Ross, 13 More Great Tunes That Seriously (Almost) Nobody Plays".
- Image: John Vachon, Old couple farming in the Ozark Mountains. Missouri, photograph, 1940. Library of Congress.