Mike In The Wilderness: A Song History
"Mike in the Wilderness" is a three-part breakdown from eastern Kentucky, played in A with the fiddle cross-tuned to AEae, and its melody shifts between Mixolydian and Dorian coloring.[1] It comes from John Morgan Salyer (1882–1952), a farmer and fiddler of Salyersville in Magoffin County, a town named for his grandfather.[1][2] In 1941 and 1942 his sons Grover and Glen recorded him at home on a disc-cutting machine, and Berea College, which now holds 48 of those acetate discs, calls him a "master of an older eastern Kentucky style" and notes that many of his tunes appear in no other documentation.[3] One item in the Berea collection, JS-ID-26, lists "Mike in the Wilderness" together with another of his tunes, "Lacy Brown."[4]
Emil Carlsen, Wood Interior, oil on canvas, about 1910. An American woodland, shown for the wilderness of the title; it is not a Kentucky scene.
Jeff Todd Titon printed Salyer's version in Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (2001), and the Traditional Tune Archive lists later recordings by Dirk Powell, Tom Sauber and John Herrman on One Eyed Dog (1993) and by Jerry O'Sullivan on The Gift (2005).[1] The sources consulted here offer no documented explanation of who Mike was or what wilderness the title means.[1] For dulcimer players, Mark Gilston has placed it in More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, a sheet-music book he publishes himself, where it keeps company with such standards as "Sourwood Mountain" and "Old Joe Clark."[5]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Mike in the Wilderness".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Biography: John Salyer".
- Berea College Special Collections and Archives: "John Morgan Salyer Collection".
- Berea College Special Collections and Archives: "JS-ID-26: Mike in the Wilderness / Lacy Brown".
- Mark Gilston: "More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer".
- Image: Emil Carlsen, Wood Interior, oil on canvas, about 1910. The Cleveland Museum of Art.