Shooting Creek: A Song History
"Shooting Creek" takes its name from a swift creek in southwestern Virginia. Alan Jabbour, as summarized by the Traditional Tune Archive, traces it from its source in the Blue Ridge, where Floyd and Franklin counties meet, eastward across Franklin County into the Piedmont.[1] In the early twentieth century the hollow it runs through was known for moonshine, and by the Prohibition years its bootleggers had made it notorious.[1] The fiddle tune named after it is a reel in D major, widely played in the Franklin and Floyd County area.[1]
National Photo Company, “Moonshine still recently confiscated by the Internal Revenue Bureau photographed at the Treasury Department,” photograph, between 1921 and 1932. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
The archive lists a 1939 Library of Congress recording from J. W. Hatcher of Franklin County (the surname is also given as Thatcher), and the Library also holds a version by Oscar Wright of Princeton, West Virginia.[1] In 1966 Jabbour recorded Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Giles County, Virginia, playing a "Shootin' Creek" that Jabbour considered comparable to the Franklin County tune yet too distinct to treat as a plain variant; Reed's two recorded versions also differ from each other, one closing its second strain an octave lower than the other.[2] The title also appears on a 1928 Columbia record by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, with Lonnie Austin fiddling. That piece is in F, and a commentator cited by the archive regards it as a form of "Cripple Creek," though its name refers to the same bootlegging district.[3][4]
The D-major tune reached the old-time revival through records such as the Fuzzy Mountain String Band's 1972 Rounder album, Rounder's Old Originals, Vol. 1 featuring Sam Connor of Copper Hill, Floyd County, and Jabbour's own recording with Tommy Thompson and Sandy Bradley on Sandy's Fancy.[1][4] It is printed in Brody's Fiddler's Fakebook (1983) and several other tune books.[1] It is one of the tunes in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[5]
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