Midnight On The Water: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"Midnight on the Water" is a Texas fiddle waltz, usually credited to the fiddler Luke Thomasson.[1][2] The story attached to it, as published, comes from his son Benny, who recalled as a boy hearing his father and an uncle put the tune together one night on the family porch.[1] Benny's biography in the Traditional Tune Archive notes that his uncle Ed Thomasson was also a fiddler.[3] Not every source agrees on the credit: some later album notes have attributed the waltz to Benny himself.[4] The Traditional Tune Archive also points to its likeness to "Old Paint," a tune collected in Oklahoma, and says it is still debated which one borrowed from the other.[1] Fiddlers play it in a cross-tuning in which both the lowest and highest strings are lowered to D, giving D-D-A-D from low to high.[1][2]

Russell Lee photograph of a couple dancing at a dance in San Angelo, Texas, 1940

Russell Lee, Couple dancing the schottische at a dance during the San Angelo Fat Stock Show. San Angelo, Texas, photograph, 1940. Farm Security Administration collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A Texas dance of the era; the couple is dancing a schottische, not this waltz.

Benny Thomasson, born in 1909 and raised in Gatesville, Texas, is regarded as a foundational figure in Texas-style fiddling.[3] He won the Texas state championship fifteen times and took the World Championship at Crockett three years running, from 1955 to 1957.[3][5] He recorded the family waltz for County Records on Country Fiddling from the Big State.[1] After he moved to Washington State in the early 1970s he shaped a generation of younger fiddlers there, Mark O'Connor among them.[3] By the mid-1970s the tune was also being recorded well outside Texas: David Bromberg made it the title of a 1975 Columbia album, and Jay Ungar and Lyn Hardy recorded it the same year. Other recordings include ones by O'Connor and by Aly Bain.[1] It has even become a song: Ron Kavana wrote words for it, and Waterson:Carthy included a sung version on their 1994 debut album.[4]

Among mountain dulcimer players, it is one of the 75 tunes in the DAD edition of Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, a book of tunes commonly played at dulcimer jams.[6]

Find books with Midnight On The Water for sale →

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Midnight on the Water".
  2. Peghead Nation: "Midnight on the Water, Part 1".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Biography: Benny Thomasson".
  4. Mainly Norfolk: "Midnight on the Water".
  5. Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas: "World Championship Fiddlers' Festival".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".