Kiowa Special: A Song History

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"Kiowa Special" is a D-major reel in standard fiddle tuning.[1] One jam tune collection lists it under both D and B minor.[2] The title refers to the Kiowa, a Native American nation now based in southwestern Oklahoma.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive says the tune is generally credited to Oklahoma fiddler Earl Collins, whose family came from Arkansas.[1] Collins was born in Douglas County, Missouri, in 1911 and moved with his family to Oklahoma in 1917. He played for square dances there during the Depression before moving to Los Angeles in 1935.[3] He gave up the fiddle in 1950 and took it up again in 1965 at the urging of his sons, who wanted to learn banjo and guitar. After that he was active among California's old-time fiddlers until his death in 1975.[3]

1937 photograph of harvest workers standing beside a mule-drawn covered wagon on an Oklahoma road

Dorothea Lange, “Bound for the wheat harvest, southwestern Oklahoma,” photograph, June 1937. Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

In print, the tune appears in Silberberg's Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern (2002), transcribed from the playing of Howie Meltzer.[1]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Kiowa Special".
  2. Pete Showman: "Some Tunes for the South Bay Old-Time Jam" (2018).
  3. Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife program book (1976): "Earl Collins: Hoedown Fiddler Takes the Lead".