Jack's Creek Ridge: A Song History

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"Jack's Creek Ridge" is an A-major reel from southeastern Kentucky. Fiddlers play it in AEac# cross-tuning, with a repeated first strain followed by a single second strain.[1] The sources consulted here trace the tune to one fiddler, Charles Hoskins of Hyden in Leslie County. Collector Peter Hoover (1939–2019) recorded him in 1961.[1][2][3] Between 1959 and 1964 Hoover spent his summers recording more than sixty musicians in eight states, Kentucky among them, and copies of his tapes are now at the Library of Congress and Indiana University's Archives of Traditional Music.[3] The Hoskins recording is in the Library of Congress as AFS 15,063A.[1] The title doesn't say which Jack's Creek is meant. Southeastern Kentucky has a road, a small community and a stream by that name.[1]

1940 photograph of a small cabin beside a rocky creek, with corn growing on the steep hillside behind

Marion Post Wolcott, mountain cabin along a creek with corn on the hillside, near Hyden, Kentucky, photograph, September 1940. Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

Hoover passed the tune on to fiddler Bruce Greene, who recorded it as an unaccompanied fiddle solo on Five Miles of Ellum Wood (1996) and credited Hoover's Hoskins tape as his source.[1][3][4] Old Time Tiki Parlor, with Dave Bragger, later included it on Big Fancy (2016).[1]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Jack's Creek Ridge".
  2. Slippery-Hill.com: "Jack's Creek Ridge" (Charles Hoskins).
  3. Field Recorders' Collective: "The Peter Hoover Collection".
  4. Bruce Greene: "Five Miles of Ellum Wood".