Nancy Blevins: A Song History
"Nancy Blevins" is a one-part reel in D from the mountains of southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina, and the Traditional Tune Archive names Albert Hash (1917–1983), the fiddler and fiddle maker who lived on Whitetop Mountain in Grayson County, Virginia, as its source.[1] In a taped conversation from around the 1970s with his nephew Kilby Spencer, Hash said he had learned it from Jim Reedy, who had it from his father, Bob Reedy, and that his own grandfather could remember dancing to it soon after the Civil War.[1] Reedy also appears among the fiddlers Hash learned from in his Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame biography.[2] Hash credited the melody to a girl who "was a great fiddler," and a family history found by Carl Barron records a Nancy Blevins (1852–1939) who married in Ashe County in 1871 and played fiddle at the Healing Springs Hotel, though the sources consulted here stop short of confirming that she made the tune.[1] According to the Tune Archive, its first strain resembles "Hawks and Eagles," a tune by the regional fiddler Norman Edmonds.[1]
George Henry Durrie, Red School House (Country Scene), oil on canvas, 1858. A snowy American country scene with a blue ridge behind; it has no connection to the tune.
A recording of Hash playing it appears on Rounder's Old Originals, Vol. 2 (1978), credited to Hash and Thornton Spencer, and it is also on a Field Recorders' Collective disc of Hash drawn from Kilby Spencer's collection.[1][3] WFDD's program Across the Blue Ridge has aired that Field Recorders' Collective recording along with Hash telling the story behind the tune.[4] Wade Ward (1892–1971), who lived near Independence, Virginia, and is celebrated as a clawhammer banjo player, played it on fiddle in 1958, and that performance appears on the Folkways memorial album Uncle Wade, whose notes describe it as "an archaic fiddle tune" with no known banjo part.[5]
Phyllis Gaskins sets it with the D tunes, which begin their scale on the open strings, in Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer), a Fingers Of Steel book that pairs its tunes with material on the Galax dulcimer's history and construction and on players who shaped the style.[6]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Nancy Blevins".
- Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame: "Albert Hash".
- Field Recorders' Collective: "Yearly Sets".
- 88.5 WFDD: "Across The Blue Ridge - A Cavalcade of Blue Ridge Music".
- Smithsonian Folkways: "Uncle Wade: A Memorial to Wade Ward, Old Time Virginia Banjo Picker, 1892-1971" (liner notes).
- Fingers Of Steel: "Phyllis Gaskins, Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer)".
- Image: George Henry Durrie, Red School House (Country Scene), oil on canvas, 1858. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.