Winder Slide: A Song History

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For all its old-fashioned sound, "Winder Slide" is not an inherited tune: Joe LaRose of Kent, Ohio, wrote it around 1980.[1][2] He wrote it in the style of Gus and Theodore Clark, a North Georgia pair who recorded two sides around 1930, and an early copy passed among players was jokingly credited to the Clarks themselves.[1] What the title means is a matter of guesswork: the Traditional Tune Archive reports several suggested readings, among them "winder" as a dialect form of "window," a nod to the town of Winder, Georgia (with "slide" as a dance), or a word for a melody that winds back on itself.[1]

Ink and wash drawing of a road winding up a hillside past rocks and trees, with two small figures at the top

Salvator Rosa, Figures on a Winding Road, pen and brown ink and brush and gray and brown wash, mid-1600s. Shown for its winding road; it has no connection to the tune.

At first the tune had only one part, and LaRose later added a second, irregular strain; that two-part form, he said, is the one "most everybody else plays."[1][2] LaRose recorded it on A Southern Catalogue (Marimac, recorded 1987 and issued 1988), Rayna Gellert put the two-part version on Ways of the World (2000), and Bruce Molsky recorded the original one-part form on Contented Must Be (Rounder Select, 2004), a track AllMusic credits to LaRose as composer.[1][2][3] It also turns up as "End of the Lane" (or "End of the Layne"), a name that, by an account reported in the Traditional Tune Archive, supposedly came about because the tune sat unannounced at the end of a privately circulated tape of Bert Layne, the fiddler known from the Skillet Lickers.[1][4]

Butch Ross includes it in 13 More Great Tunes That Seriously (Almost) Nobody Plays, a Fingers Of Steel collection of seldom-heard tunes, mostly in D and DAD tuning, which gives this one in two arrangements, one of them a sixteenth-note version.[5]

Our books that contain the song "Winder Slide"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Winder Slide".
  2. Pete Showman: "Winder Slide" (transcription with Joe LaRose's 2015 comments).
  3. AllMusic: "Winder Slide - Bruce Molsky".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:End of the Lane".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Butch Ross, 13 More Great Tunes That Seriously (Almost) Nobody Plays".
  6. Image: Salvator Rosa, Figures on a Winding Road, pen and brown ink and brush and gray and brown wash, mid-1600s. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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