Jack Wilson: A Song History

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"Jack Wilson" is an old-time breakdown in D that the Traditional Tune Archive traces to John Morgan Salyer (1882–1952), a fiddler from Salyersville in Magoffin County, eastern Kentucky.[1] The archive's biography of Salyer calls him a fiddler and farmer, notes that the town carries his grandfather's name, and describes his playing as archaic and the tunes he learned locally as unusual.[2] His sons, Grover and Glen, recorded him on a home disc-cutting machine in 1941 and 1942; Berea College holds the resulting forty-eight acetate discs, which also capture cross-tunings and accompaniment from the sons on banjo, mandolin and guitar.[3] On Salyer's own recording of "Jack Wilson," a fiddle and banjo duet, the fiddle is hard to make out, and the Traditional Tune Archive notes that the folk process has since carried the tune some way from how he played it.[1] The sources consulted here do not say who the Jack Wilson of the title was.[1]

A dark red-brown violin standing upright against a grey background

Andrew Hyde, Violin, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1889. An American fiddle of John Salyer's lifetime, shown for the tune's fiddle tradition; it has no connection to him.

Berea College's Appalachian Center released an album of the discs, John M. Salyer: Home Recordings 1941–1942, in 1993, and the tune has since been printed in Stacy Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994), Jeff Todd Titon's Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (2001) and the Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes (2011).[1] The Traditional Tune Archive lists a 1991 recording by the Wandering Ramblers, and it carries a second transcription, taken down from Bruce Molsky in Edinburgh in 1999, that is credited as coming from Salyer's playing.[1][4] Neal Walters and Heidi Cerrigione arrange it twice, once in D and once in C, for 30 Old Time Tunes, a dulcimer book and an autoharp book that are compatible with each other, each setting all 30 of its songs in two keys.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Jack Wilson"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Jack Wilson" (annotation).
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "John Salyer".
  3. Berea College Special Collections & Archives: "John Morgan Salyer Collection".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Jack Wilson" (tune page).
  5. Neal Walters and Heidi Cerrigione: "30 Old Time Tunes".
  6. Image: Andrew Hyde, Violin, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1889. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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