Lonesome John: A Song History
"Lonesome John" is an old-time reel from eastern Kentucky, and the Traditional Tune Archive counts it as a well-liked tune there, above all in Magoffin and Morgan Counties.[1] The archive's notated versions come from two fiddlers of those counties, John M. Salyer of Salyersville and Santford "Fiddlin' Sam" Kelly of West Liberty.[1] Salyer, born in 1882, was recorded at home by his sons Grover and Glen, who cut acetate discs of his playing in 1941 and 1942; that collection is now kept by Berea College's Special Collections and Archives.[2] Kelly was in his sixties when Peter Hoover recorded him near West Liberty in the early 1960s, and the Field Recorders' Collective's release of those recordings, FRC503, has two takes of this tune.[3] Jane Keefer's Folk Music Index dates both of Kelly's takes to August 23, 1963.[4]
William Louis Sonntag, Frontier Cabin, watercolor and gouache, 1894. A lone cabin in wooded hills, shown for the backwoods home of the tune's fiddlers; it is not a Kentucky scene.
Printed versions disagree about the mode: Miles Krassen's Appalachian Fiddle (1973) gives A Aeolian, Reiner's Anthology of Fiddle Styles (1979) A Dorian, and Jeff Titon's Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (2001), taken from Salyer, A Mixolydian, while fiddlers play it in either standard or AEae tuning.[1][4] Titon observed that Salyer sounded his C notes somewhere between natural and sharp, notes Salyer himself called "wild," and the archive's annotation treats this not as faulty technique but as something many old-time fiddlers share.[1] Mike Yates has suggested a kinship with "Salt Creek" and with Hobart Smith's "Pateroller Song."[1] John McCutcheon, who learned it from Scott Boatright of Fort Blackmore, Virginia, recorded it on Fine Times at Our House in 1982, and Keefer's index lists later recordings by Dirk Powell, Tim O'Brien and John Herrmann (1998) and by the Reeltime Travelers (2000).[1][4] In The Early Years, which gathers tablature Stephen Seifert first wrote out as workshop handouts and opens with an introduction on technique, he sets it in DGD tuning with a capo at the first fret.[5]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Lonesome John".
- Berea College Special Collections and Archives: "John Morgan Salyer Collection".
- Field Recorders' Collective: "Santford Kelly – FRC503".
- Jane Keefer, Folk Music Index: "Lones to Longs".
- Stephen Seifert: "The Early Years".
- Image: William Louis Sonntag, Frontier Cabin, watercolor and gouache, 1894. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.