Pinedale: A Song History

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The "Pinedale Waltz" is an American waltz from Arizona, set in D major and three-four time.[1] According to the Traditional Tune Archive, which draws on the work of Larry V. Shumway, the tune took its name from the town of Pinedale, Arizona, around 1900.[1] The archive traces it to the playing of the Arizona fiddler Kenner Casteel Kartchner, and no composer is named in the sources consulted here.[1]

Painting of a slender tree on a wooded slope above a stream

Giovanni Segantini, Pine Tree, oil on canvas, c. 1897. An Alpine scene rather than an Arizona one, shown for the title.

Kartchner was a northern Arizona pioneer who worked as a farmer, cowboy, sheep shearer, timber worker and forest ranger, and who learned his tunes by ear and fiddled at community square dances, among many other settings.[2] His memoir, Frontier Fiddler: The Life of a Northern Arizona Pioneer, edited by his grandson Shumway, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 1990 with transcriptions of his tunes.[2] The waltz is printed in that book, and Skip Gorman later recorded it for Rounder on his album Lonesome Prairie Love.[1] A library listing of that album shows it paired with "Black Hills."[3] A "Pinedale Waltz" is also among the tunes in An Old-Time Utah Dance Party, a 2000 Utah Arts Council book of sheet music transcribed from field recordings made at Utah dances.[4]

A tune listed simply as "Pinedale" appears in The Doofus - Occasional Number 4 - 18 Favorite Waltzes For Autoharp, a collection of autoharp arrangements in sheet-music form by Neal Walters and Heidi Cerrigione, of the band The Doofus; the listing names no composer or source, so it does not say whether this is the Arizona waltz.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Pinedale"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Pinedale Waltz".
  2. Indiana University, Folklore Forum: "Review of Frontier Fiddler: The Life of a Northern Arizona Pioneer" (Gregory Hansen, 1996).
  3. PointCulture (Médiathèque): "Lonesome Prairie Love".
  4. Weber State University Stewart Library: "An Old-Time Utah Dance Party: Sheet Music and Dance Steps".
  5. Neal Walters: "The Doofus - Occasional Number 4 - 18 Favorite Waltzes For Autoharp".
  6. Image: Giovanni Segantini, Pine Tree, oil on canvas, c. 1897. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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