Western Carolina Waltz: A Song History

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"Western Carolina Waltz" is the tenth of the fifteen waltzes in Larry Conger's The Waltz Collection, a book in DAD tuning published by Fingers Of Steel; the listing credits the tune to Conger himself and calls it "Larry's own."[1] The listing describes most of the book's other pieces as traditional American waltzes from the fiddle and dance repertoire, with one old parlor song among them, and the download comes with an MP3 recording of every tune.[1]

Engraving of a finely dressed man and woman in sixteenth-century clothing stepping together in a dance

Heinrich Aldegrever, Dancing Couple, from "The Small Wedding Dancers", engraving, 1538. A sixteenth-century couple, long before the waltz, shown for the dance; it has no connection to the tune.

The sources consulted here do not explain the title or say when the tune was written, and they record no older tune of the same name.[1][2][3] Conger's own website offers a recording of the waltz as a single audio track, credited there to Larry and Elaine Conger.[2] According to his DulcimerDownloads biography, Conger won the National Mountain Dulcimer Championship at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, in 1998; the same biography notes that he and Elaine direct Dulcimer U, a dulcimer workshop program at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina.[3]

Our book that contains the song "Western Carolina Waltz"

Sources

  1. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, The Waltz Collection".
  2. Larry Conger: "Audio Tracks & CDs".
  3. DulcimerDownloads: "Larry Conger – Mountain Dulcimer Books & Bio".
  4. Image: Heinrich Aldegrever, Dancing Couple, from "The Small Wedding Dancers", engraving, 1538. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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