Mississippi Sawyer: A Song History

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Merriam-Webster records a sense of "sawyer" that has nothing to do with cutting wood: a tree stuck fast in a riverbed whose branches break the surface and rock up and down in the current.[1] Folklorist Charles Wolfe read the tune's title in that river sense. He described sawyers as uprooted trees, partly anchored to the bottom, that could surge up without warning ahead of a boat, a hazard serious enough that government snag boats worked the Mississippi to clear them, and he reasoned that nineteenth-century fiddlers, living in the age of the river trade, would have known exactly what the name meant.[2] The Tune Archive dates it among American fiddlers to the early 1800s. George P. Knauff included it, as "Love from the Heart," in the fourth volume of his Virginia Reels (Baltimore, 1839), among the earliest known printings.[2] Older fiddlers frequently call it "The Downfall of Paris," the name it went by in Texas around 1935; under that title, John Hatcher of Tishomingo County, Mississippi, was recorded playing it for the Library of Congress in 1939.[2]

Currier and Ives lithograph of lit steamboats rounding a wooded bend of the Mississippi at night, 1866

Frances Flora Bond Palmer for Currier & Ives, “Rounding a Bend” on the Mississippi – The Parting Salute, hand-colored lithograph, 1866. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Steamboats on the Mississippi; the print is not connected to the tune.

The tune's recorded history begins unusually early. Don Richardson, a fiddler born in Clinton, North Carolina, recorded it for Columbia on May 5, 1916, and Columbia issued it that August on a disc backed with "Durang's Hornpipe."[3] Historian Patrick Huber has noted that a strong case could be made for Richardson as the first traditional Southern musician to record commercially, six years before Eck Robertson and Henry Gilliland recorded for Victor in 1922, in which case that disc would count as the first country record. Huber himself, though, declines to crown any disc the first, calling such attempts "a fool's errand."[3] In July 1924 Whitter's Virginia Breakdowners, with James Sutphin on fiddle, John Rector on banjo and Henry Whitter on guitar, cut it in New York for OKeh as a square-dance number.[4] Discographer Gus Meade counted 23 early commercial recordings, among them versions by Al Hopkins and Uncle Jimmy Thompson in 1926, Ernest Stoneman in 1927, Gid Tanner in 1928 and the Kessinger Brothers in 1929.[2] Folklorists recorded it in the field as well: Herbert Halpert recorded three Mississippi fiddlers playing it in 1939, and Vance Randolph recorded Ozark fiddlers playing it for the Library of Congress in the early 1940s.[2]

Charles Wolfe found it among the set tunes of an 1899 fiddle contest in Gallatin, Tennessee, where the fiddlers competed for a prize with their own versions of the same piece.[2] The Tune Archive lists it as widely known in fiddling from Pennsylvania and Virginia to Texas and Missouri.[2] Today it is a mountain dulcimer jam favorite, included among the 75 tunes in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam.[5]

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Sources

  1. Merriam-Webster: "Sawyer".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Mississippi Sawyer (1)".
  3. Before the Big Bang (Archeophone Records): "Don Richardson: The First Country Recording Artist?" by Patrick Huber.
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "OKeh matrix S-72692. Mississippi sawyer / Whitter's Virginia Breakdowners".
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".