Sugar Hill: A Song History
"Sugar Hill" is an old-time fiddle reel that also circulates as a song, and its title has prompted more than one explanation. The Traditional Tune Archive gathers several: one annotator tied it to drunken sprees during "sugaring-off," when maple sap is boiled down into sugar; another reading holds that the song has African American roots and that "sugar hill" meant the rough side of town, its red-light district.[1] Writing in 2002, Mike Yates reported that the song is believed to have been composed by George Washington Dixon sometime before 1827; a version later appeared in a collection of blackface minstrel songs printed in New York in 1855.[1]
Arthur Rothstein, Mountain farm. Rappahannock County, Virginia, photograph, 1940. Farm Security Administration collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A Blue Ridge hill farm; the photograph is not connected to the tune.
The tune travelled widely. Vance Randolph listed it among Ozark fiddle tunes in 1954, and in that region it sometimes went by "Bunker Hill."[1] It is most closely identified, though, with the Galax, Virginia, string-band style and with Surry County, North Carolina, a link probably strengthened by the first commercial recordings, made by Davey Crockett Ward and His Boys in 1928 and by Dad Crockett on a Brunswick 78 in 1929.[1] Grayson County fiddler Emmett Lundy recorded it in Galax for the Library of Congress in 1941, and Tommy Jarrell of Toast, North Carolina, who learned it from his father Ben Jarrell, recorded it more than once, including on an album with Fred Cockerham.[1] The Fuzzy Mountain String Band learned it from Jarrell and put it on their 1973 album Summer Oaks and Porch.[1]
For mountain dulcimer players, "Sugar Hill" is one of the tunes in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam collection in DAD tuning.[2]
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