Brian Smalley" St. Anne's Reel"

I often get lost in meaningless contemplation, such as: “How many fiddle tunes have been lost?” Think about it, we know gobs and gobs of Appalachian and Celtic (just to name a few) traditional tunes, but surely it must be just the tip of an iceberg. Consider the thousands upon thousands of tunes that must have faded into the mists of time. Deep thought, yes.
They say fiddler Don Messer had a popular Canadian Television folk show on the radio, and this tune, “St. Anne’s Reel,” became popularized when he’d play it over the airwaves of the CBC.
But they say my great great uncle Billy Bob from Snickersnee Knob in Sassafras County wrote dang-near almost fifty fiddle tunes, like “The Cow Drank All The Moonshine” and “Sister Sally’s Got The Collywobbles,” but no one remembers how they go.
Storage media has revolutionized the music industry again and again: sheet music, radio, TV, internet, Schlockify, I mean Spot…Spoti…Spotif…(Oh I can’t bring myself to even say that word!) But you see what I am sayin’. Any media, no matter how primitive is more reliable than word of mouth. But the fact that so many tunes have come down to us from campfire to campfire to home fire, that is a wondrous phenomenon. Dad is sitting in front of the fire, with his feet propped up on the hearth, an old banjer in hands that are so crippled from slamming away at a coal vein in the mine all day that his right hand has become a claw, still he’s pickin’ out the old tunes that his daddy had taught him, and so Junior is stretched out on the bearskin rug, soaking it all in, unbeknownst to Junior, he’s getting a musical education; and one day Junior will teach those songs to his kids.
Traditional music societies have done an incredible job of preserving so many of these jewels, and we thank them from the bottom of our hearts.
Have a fabulous fiddle tune Friday.