Sarah Armstrong: A Song History
"Sarah Armstrong" is a two-part reel in D major, played in standard fiddle tuning and named for the Pennsylvania fiddler from whom it was collected.[1] Born Sarah Gray in 1883 at Gray Station, near Derry in Westmoreland County, she grew up in a musical family of Ulster-Irish descent whose men played for dances, and she took up the fiddle at the age of five, learning above all from her uncle Laney.[2] In November 1943 the Penn State professor Samuel Bayard visited her twice and wrote down close to forty of her tunes.[2]
Alpo S. Tuura, Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, etching, 1928. A Pennsylvania town near Pittsburgh in 1928, shown for the region the tune comes from; it has no connection to the tune.
He printed this reel with no proper name, simply as an "Old Reel," as No. 33 of Hill Country Tunes, a collection of instrumental folk music from southwestern Pennsylvania that the American Folklore Society published in Philadelphia in 1944 as volume 39 of its Memoirs.[1][3] The title it goes by now was attached later, after the tune began circulating among revival fiddlers.[1] Armstrong's tunes reappeared in Bayard's later collection, Dance to the Fiddle, March to the Fife.[2] This reel has also been reprinted in newer fiddle books such as the second volume of The Portland Collection (2005).[1]
Dulcimer players can find it among the old-time American pieces in Mark Gilston's More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, a 53-page sheet-music book that Gilston publishes himself.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Sarah Armstrong".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Biography: Sarah Armstrong".
- Penn Libraries: "Hill country tunes; instrumental folk music of southwestern Pennsylvania".
- Mark Gilston: "More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer".
- Image: Alpo S. Tuura, Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, etching, 1928. The Cleveland Museum of Art.