Last Of Harris: A Song History
"Last of Harris" traces back to one fiddler, John M. Salyer (1882–1952), a farmer from Salyersville in Magoffin County, eastern Kentucky, a town named for his grandfather.[1][2] Jeff Titon, writing in Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (2001), found no other source musician for the tune.[1] It survives because Salyer's sons, Grover and Glen, made discs of their father's playing on a home disc-cutting machine in 1941 and 1942, backing him on guitar and mandolin.[2][3] Berea College's sound archives call Salyer a "master of an older eastern Kentucky style."[3] None of the sources consulted here says who Harris was or what the title refers to.
Marion Post Wolcott, “Mountain farmstead, Breathitt County, Kentucky,” photograph, October 1940. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
The Traditional Tune Archive classes it as a G-major reel in standard fiddle tuning, with a single A part followed by a repeated B part.[1] Fiddler Bruce Greene told Titon he heard a likeness to Doc Roberts's "I've Got a Gal Named Susie."[1] The home recordings were issued in 1993, when Berea College's Appalachian Center released John M. Salyer: Home Recordings 1941–1942; that same year Bruce Molsky put the tune on his album Warring Cats.[1] It has since been printed in Titon's book and in the Milliner–Koken collection of American fiddle tunes (2011).[1] Molsky later recorded a twin-fiddle version with Tatiana Hargreaves for Peghead Nation,[4] and mountain dulcimer players will find the tune in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam II.[5]
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