Tucker's Barn: A Song History

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The Traditional Tune Archive files "Tucker's Barn" under the title "Tucker's Old Barn," a North Carolina reel whose first strain is in D and second in G, with the tune moving back and forth between the two keys.[1] Gaither Carlton of western North Carolina played it, as did his son-in-law, Doc Watson.[1] Stories about the name differ: the archive links it to a Tucker family settlement on Lower Creek in Caldwell County, founded around 1765, whose home was a local gathering place; Watson connected it to a barn built of black locust and fastened with locust pegs instead of nails; and East Tennessee fiddler Joe Birchfield and his band, when asked, laughingly identified Tucker's Barn as a well-known Tennessee brothel.[1]

Black-and-white lithograph of a weathered wooden barn beside a bare tree on a hillside

Charles Henry Alston, Barn and Tree, lithograph, 1935–43. A plain wooden barn, drawn in the 1930s or 1940s by the North Carolina-born artist Charles Alston, shown for the tune's title; the lithograph has no connection to the tune.

Carlton recorded the tune on fiddle in 1964 with Watson on guitar, and the track appeared in 1977 on The Watson Family Tradition (Rounder 0129 in the United States, Topic 12TS336 in Britain).[2] The archive also notes that Bascom Lamar Lunsford fiddled a "Tucker's Barn" for the Library of Congress in New York in 1935, and it lists later recordings by the Ledford String Band (1972), Trapezoid (1980) and Mac Benford and the Woodshed All-Stars (1996), the last learned from Carlton.[1] A G-major "Tucker's Old Barn" from Madison County, played by Byard Ray after his great-uncle Mitch Wallin, is treated there as a separate tune or at most a very distant relative.[3]

Phyllis Gaskins places it among the D tunes of Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer), a Fingers Of Steel collection for the Galax dulcimer, written in her own adapted notation with playing instructions and with directions for DAD tuning as well.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Tucker's Barn"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Tucker's Old Barn (1)".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "The Watson Family".
  3. Traditional Tune Archive: "Tucker's Old Barn (2)".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Phyllis Gaskins, Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer)".
  5. Image: Charles Henry Alston, Barn and Tree, lithograph, 1935–43. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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