Southern Aristocracy: A Song History

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"Southern Aristocracy" is listed in the Traditional Tune Archive and in its predecessor, The Fiddler's Companion, as another name for an old-time tune documented under the older title "Colored Aristocracy."[1][2] Both references date the piece to the late 1800s or around 1900 and class it as a cakewalk more than a fiddle tune,[1][2] and the Tune Archive adds that its syncopated rhythm points toward ragtime.[1] A West Virginia Humanities Council essay is more cautious, saying only that the earliest records of a song by that name seem to come out of the pre-ragtime cakewalk tradition.[3] The title itself turns up on older sheet music: researcher Peter Shenkin connected it to a song from the 1902 Williams and Walker show In Dahomey, and an 1899 cakewalk by Gus W. Bernard carried the same name, yet the Tune Archive notes that neither piece is the melody fiddlers play today.[1]

View across the fields and new homesteads of the Arthurdale project, West Virginia, 1935

Walker Evans, View of Arthurdale Project, Reedsville, West Virginia, June 1935. Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. The Rich family was recorded at Arthurdale the following year; the photograph does not show them.

In 1936 musicologist Charles Seeger recorded fiddler Sanford Rich and his family for the Library of Congress at Arthurdale, a Depression-era resettlement community in Preston County that Eleanor Roosevelt championed.[1][3] The Humanities Council essay says the Riches came to Arthurdale from a mining town near Morgantown, having been asked to play while the First Lady was visiting.[3] Notes to the New Lost City Ramblers' first Folkways album name the players on that Library of Congress disc as Sanford and Harry Rich on fiddles, Hensel Rich on guitar and Elmer Rich on mandolin, and place the session at an Arthurdale fiddlers' convention.[4]

Mike Seeger, Charles's son, picked up the tune as a child from the aluminum discs kept in the family home, and he recorded it with the New Lost City Ramblers on the band's 1958 debut album, which carried it to revival fiddlers.[1][3][4] The Humanities Council essay credits that one Sanford Rich performance as the root of Taj Mahal's 1969 recording and of the tune as most traditional players now learn it.[3] A tune titled "Southern Aristocracy" also appears in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam collection for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning.[5]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Colored Aristocracy".
  2. Andrew Kuntz, The Fiddler's Companion (ibiblio): "Colored Aristocracy".
  3. West Virginia Humanities Council, The Broad Side (April 2024): "Aristocracy of Preston County".
  4. Smithsonian Folkways: liner notes to The New Lost City Ramblers (Folkways FA 2396, 1958).
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".