Rose In The Mountain: A Song History
"Rose in the Mountain," also called "Rose of the Mountain" or "Rose on the Mountain," is a crooked reel in D that comes down from the eastern Kentucky fiddler John Salyer (1882–1952).[1] A farmer from Salyersville in Magoffin County, a town named for his grandfather, Salyer played in an archaic style and used several different tunings.[2] In 1941 and 1942 his sons Grover and Glen recorded him at home on a disc-cutting machine, and those forty-eight acetate discs are now kept by Berea College's Special Collections and Archives.[3] Berea's Appalachian Center issued recordings from them as John M. Salyer: Home Recordings, 1941–42 in 1993, and "Rose in the Mountain" is among the tunes the Tune Archive traces to those discs.[1]
John La Farge, Wild Roses and Irises, gouache and watercolor, 1887. Wild roses, shown for the title; the study has no connection to the tune.
Jeff Titon, who printed the tune in Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (2001), thought it might once have been a march and saw a relative in a "Rose on the Mountain" printed in Knauff's 1839 collection; the Tune Archive's annotator finds only a few matching bars at the end and doubts the two are kin, and sees no tie at all to J.P. Fraley's "Wild Rose of the Mountain."[1] Later fiddlers took it up as well: a transcription of Bruce Molsky's version of Salyer's playing has been printed, and Bruce Greene and Hilry Dirlam recorded it on Fiddler's Dozen (1994).[1] On mountain dulcimer, Don Pedi gives it in DAD tuning in Bound To Have A Little Fun!, a book he publishes himself whose listing stresses his care for historical accuracy in transcribing.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Rose in the Mountain".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Biography: John Salyer".
- Berea College Special Collections and Archives: "John Morgan Salyer Collection".
- Don Pedi: "Bound To Have A Little Fun!".
- Image: John La Farge, Wild Roses and Irises, gouache and watercolor, 1887. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.