Sandy Boys: A Song History
"Sandy Boys" is a modal fiddle tune in A, usually played with the fiddle cross-tuned to AEae, and it comes down to us from the repertoire of Edden Hammons of Pocahontas County, West Virginia.[1] Hammons (1875–1955) farmed and hunted for a living and came from a large, musical family that had settled in the Webster–Pocahontas country before the Civil War; he is counted among the best traditional fiddlers West Virginia has known.[2] In 1947 the West Virginia University folklorist Louis Chappell recorded 52 of his tunes in a hotel room in Richwood, and most of them were later issued by West Virginia University Press.[2][3] "Sandy Boys" is one of them: it appears on the first volume of the press's The Edden Hammons Collection, a 1999 CD drawn from the 1947 sessions.[1]
Marion Post Wolcott, Mountaineer riding on muleback up a creek bed to his farm. Breathitt County, Kentucky, photograph, 1940. Farm Security Administration collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. An Appalachian mountain creek of the era, in Kentucky rather than Hammons’s West Virginia; not connected to the tune.
The melody is older than Hammons's recording. According to the Traditional Tune Archive, its roots lie in the minstrel-show repertoire: a related melody appears in an 1844 minstrel songbook and in Phil Rice's 1857 banjo tutor Correct Method for the Banjo, though its second strain does not match Hammons's.[1] Gerry Milnes has documented bawdy West Virginia verses for the tune, and the Archive also points to a related Missouri tune, Gene Goforth's "Quail is a Pretty Bird."[1]
Later players kept the tune in circulation. A setting from Burl Hammons, a younger member of the same family, was printed in Krassen's Masters of Old Time Fiddling (1983), and the tune has since appeared in jam collections such as The Portland Collection and on revival recordings by Dan Gellert & Brad Leftwich and the Ill-Mo Boys, among others.[1][3] The Tune Archive suggests that the version now common at festivals may have come from Bob Herring's imperfect learning of Hammons's tune.[1] The similarly named "Sandy River Belle" is a separate tune, a G-major piece rooted in Patrick County, Virginia.[4] For mountain dulcimer players, "Sandy Boys" is included in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, a collection of popular tunes from the dulcimer jam tradition.[5]
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