Gunboat: A Song History
"Gunboat" is an A-major breakdown from Braxton County, West Virginia, notated for fiddle in AEae cross-tuning.[1] It is best known from Ernie Carpenter, who learned it from Wallace Pritchard.[1] Carpenter's family repertoire reached back five generations of fiddlers. He was a grandson of William "Squirrelly Bill" Carpenter, and the family home at the mouth of Laurel Fork, a deep personal loss for him, went under the waters of the Sutton Dam after its completion in 1955.[2] He received West Virginia's Vandalia Award in 1988 and died in 1997.[2] He recorded "Gunboat" on Elk River Blues (Augusta Heritage Records, 1986), an album of tunes from Braxton County.[1][2] A 1986 Carpenter recording of the tune, drawn from Gerry Milnes's collection, appears on Old Time Fiddle Tunes from the Elk River Country.[3]
Timothy H. O’Sullivan, “U.S. Gunboat ‘Commodore Perry’ on Pamunkey River,” albumen silver print, 1861–65. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The tune also circulated under other names. Melvin Wine, another Braxton County fiddler,[4] called it "Gunboat Whistled into Georgi-o," and the Traditional Tune Archive cross-references it with Wine's "Going Down to Georgie-O."[1] Wine played that tune in D in standard tuning and recorded it on Cold Frosty Morning (Poplar, 1976).[4] The title has led some people to treat "Gunboat" as a Civil War tune, but the archive says nothing proves it.[1] Even so, it was included on The Civil War Collection, Vol. II by Jim Taylor and others. A notated version comes from Kentucky fiddler Bruce Greene.[1] The sources consulted here list only one fiddle tune called "Gunboat."
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