Wake Robin: A Song History

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"Wake Robin" is a fiddle air in 3/4 time from Marcus Martin (1881–1974), a fiddler from western North Carolina. The Traditional Tune Archive gives it in D major with the fiddle cross-tuned DDad, lists it in two parts (ABB), and cross-references it to a tune called "The Nightingale."[1] Martin played it for the folklorist Artus Moser, whose disc recordings went to the Library of Congress archive in the 1940s.[1][2][3] No earlier source or composer for the tune turned up in the sources consulted here.

Botanical watercolor of a white trillium flower with three broad green leaves

Mary Vaux Walcott, Wake-Robin (Trillium grandiflorum), watercolor on paper, 1918. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Public domain (CC0).

Martin was born in Macon County, North Carolina, and learned the fiddle from his father, Rowan Martin.[4][2] He played for square dances in Macon and Cherokee counties. In the 1920s he moved to Swannanoa, where he worked as a watchman at the Beacon Blanket Mill.[2] He became a fixture at Bascom Lamar Lunsford's Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, where he often opened with "Grey Eagle," and he was named champion fiddler at the North Carolina State Fair in 1949 and again in 1950.[2] Dulcimer players may like to know that he also built fiddles and mountain dulcimers.[2]

The title is also a common name for trilliums, woodland wildflowers that bloom in spring; Trillium erectum, for one, is known as wake-robin.[5] The sources consulted here do not say whether Martin's tune was named for the flower. Fiddler Kenny Jackson recorded it in a medley with "Boatsman" on his 2004 album Over the Mountain, a nod to Martin noted in a Sing Out! review.[6][1]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Wake Robin".
  2. Swannanoa Valley Museum & History Center: "Fiddle a Possum Out of a Tree: Marcus Martin (1881-1974)".
  3. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Southern Folklife Collection: "Artus Moser Papers, 1921-1988".
  4. Wikipedia: "Marcus Martin (fiddler)".
  5. North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox (NC State University): "Trillium erectum".
  6. Kenny Jackson Music: "Reviews".