Over The Waterfall: A Song History

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"Over the Waterfall" is tied to the fiddler Henry Reed (1884–1968), who was born near Peterstown in Monroe County, West Virginia, and spent much of his adult life across the state line in Glen Lyn, Virginia.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive classes it as a D-major breakdown, played AABB in most versions.[2] Reed told folklorist Alan Jabbour that he picked it up from "Teets's Show" when he was only five or six; the Archive suggests he may have heard it played on a steam calliope at a circus or medicine show, and connects the melody to a mid-nineteenth-century comic song, "The Fellow That Looks Like Me," credited to J. E. Poole.[2] That exchange is preserved on the Library of Congress recording of Reed playing the tune at his family's home in Glen Lyn on May 6, 1967.[3]

Currier and Ives color lithograph of Falling Spring waterfall among autumn trees in the Virginia mountains, 1868

Currier & Ives after a painting by Samuel Colman, Falling Spring, Virginia, color lithograph, 1868. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A Virginia waterfall; the print is not connected to the tune.

Jabbour, then a graduate student at Duke University, recorded Reed often in 1966–67, when Reed was in his eighties.[1][4] The Library of Congress now presents those field recordings online as Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection, and one of the collection's essays lists "Over the Waterfall" among a handful of tunes it considers perhaps the most characteristic of that frontier repertoire.[4][5] Jabbour played Reed's tunes with the Hollow Rock String Band, a group from the Durham–Chapel Hill area,[1] whose 1968 LP Traditional Dance Tunes (Kanawha 311), with Jabbour on fiddle, Tom Thompson on banjo, Bobbie Thompson on guitar and Bertram Levy on mandolin, included the tune.[6] A Library of Congress essay suggests it may be the most widely circulated of Reed's tunes and says every version played today comes from him, by way of the band and of the tapes that revival musicians copied and traded.[7]

The tune is now known across the country,[1] and the Tune Archive observes that it has grown so common among old-time fiddlers that it is generally thought of as a piece for beginners.[2] It turns up on other instruments too: the Archive lists it on The Hammered Dulcimer by Fennig's All Stars (Front Hall),[2] and it is one of the 75 tunes in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer jam book Join the Jam.[8]

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Sources

  1. e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia: "Henry Reed" (by Alan Jabbour).
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Over the Waterfall".
  3. Library of Congress: "Over the Waterfall" (Henry Reed, fiddle; Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier).
  4. Library of Congress: "Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection – About this Collection".
  5. Library of Congress: "The Historical and Cultural Significance of Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier".
  6. Discogs: "Hollow Rock String Band – Traditional Dance Tunes" (Kanawha 311).
  7. Library of Congress: "Radiating Influence" (Henry Reed: His Life, Influence, and Art).
  8. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".