01. Robinson County/Peacock Rag

02. Little Beggar Man/Sandy River Belle

03. Battle Cry of Freedom/The Cuckoo’s Nest  

04. Polly Put The Kettle On

05. Allegheny County

06. Whistling Rufus

07. The Drunken Wagoner

08. The Old Folks Polka

09. Blackberry Blossom/June Apple

10. Ducks On The Pond

11. Temperance Reel/Green Fields Of America

12. Over the Waterfall

13. Boatman/Angelina Baker

14. Kit’s Waltz

15. The Road To Richmond

16. Silver Bells

17. Mardi Gras Dance

18. The Lone Pilgrim

19. Pappy Taylor’s Hornpipe

20. Wink The Other Eye/Buffalo Gals

21. I Shall Arise and Come to Jesus

22. The Battle Cry of Munster/The Keel Row  

23. Little Beggar Man/Salt Creek

24. Fishers Hornpipe

25. Midnight on the Water

26. Ragtime Annie

 

Tracks 2 and 4 previously released on My Heart Belongs to Jenny (Day Job Records).

Tracks 3 and 10 previously released on When You Ask A Girl To Leave Her Happy Home, (Arabica).

Tracks 6 and 20 previously released on The Roots And Branches of American Music (Les Cousins).

Tracks 8 previously released on When You Wore a Tulip (Kicking Mule). 

Tracks 13 and 14 previously released on The Preacher’s Son (Fulica).

Tracks 16 and 17 previously released on Contemporary Guitar Workshop (Kicking Mule).

All other tracks previously unissued.

 

8, 1974, Blue Bear Studios, San Francisco, CA, Mark Needham, engineer

16, 17, 1977, Livingston Studios, Barnet, Nick Kinsey, engineer

24, live recording, May 26, 1978, Other Side of the Tracks, Auburn, WA

11, live recording, June, 1979, Teatro Impero, Varese, Italy

26, live recording, early 1983, Florence, Italy, Stefano Lugli, engineer 

5, 9, August 27, 1987, Mobius Music, San Francisco, CA, Oliver de Cicco, engineer

25, live recording, April 23, 1988, Stourbridge, England 

19, live recording, March 13, 1990, Trysull. England

7, June, 1998, Los Medanos College Studio, Pittsburg, CA, Riki Feldman, engineer

23, live recording, 12/22/2002, Freight & Salvage, Berkeley, CA

13, 2007, West Beach Studios, North Wales, Mark Pavey, engineer

14, 2010, West Beach Studios, North Wales, Mark Pavey, engineer. 

3, 10, March, 2011, studio, Minneapolis, MN, Dave Hull, engineer

all other tracks recorded in the late 1990s, Mix-O-Lydian Studios, Lafayatte, NJ, Don Sternecker, engineer

 

Standard tuning except for:

D-A-D-G-B-E  (tracks 1, 3, 5, 7, 12, 21, 25) 

D-G-D-G-B-D (track 4)    

D-G-A-G-B-E  (track 20)  

C-G-D-G-C-F  (track 10)  

On track 10, the actual pitch is F#-C#-G#-C#-F#-B, played on a requinto guitar tuned E-B-F#-B-E-A with a capo on the 2nd fret (normal tuning would be G#-C#-F#-B-D#-G# on this small guitar).

 

 

When folkie guitarists of my generation were aspiring to be hot young fingerpickers in the 1960’s, our main reference point was people like Dave Van Ronk, who played blues and ragtime, and the early blues and country musicians who had defined the styles in the 1920s and ’30s. In trying to expand our repertoires one of the first things we looked at was fiddle tunes from the old-time/bluegrass repertory, and over the years I have included a fair few of these on my own solo projects, as well as anthologies that featured other guitarists, and on records I made with other artists. I never got around to making a solo record devoted this part of my repertoire, but at some point I thought it would be worthwhile to pull one together, combining tracks that had appeared on record with performances that had not seen commercial release. Of the latter, some were intended for inclusion with instructional projects, and a couple come from a demo tape. Six were recorded at live performances over the years, and these include knuckle-busters like “Salt Creek” and “Ragtime Annie” that I never even attempted to record in a studio setting, as well as tunes like “Fishers Hornpipe”, which I did record, but which I was freer with live. Hopefully the imperfect audio quality of some of the live tracks is not too distracting. In all, 15 of the 26 tracks here are previously unissued, and while other versions of many of these tunes did appear on record, there are a half-dozen that I never recorded as solos elsewhere.

 

Several of these tunes are not really “fiddle tunes”, even by the broad definition American musicians use; two are gospel songs and two were Cajun accordion tunes. On the other hand, a tune like my own “Road To Richmond” would be thought of as a fiddle tune because even though it was written for guitar, it was consciously written in the style of a bluegrass fiddle tune. There are also a couple of tunes that began life as ragtime tunes or minstrel-era songs. These entered into the repertoire of old-time fiddlers alongside their own tunes and those inherited from Irish, Scottish, and English tradition. The way I approached this side of my repertoire was very similar to the fiddlers and banjo players whose territory I aimed to encroach on. I wanted to play their music on guitar, and figure out how to do a good job of it, and that was all there was to it. 

 

In looking back, it’s interesting that there weren’t any fiddlers or banjo players involved with the folkie scene in Richmond, VA in the 1960s, and none of the guitarists were deeply into Chet Atkins (I didn’t hear things like Chet’s “Black Mountain Rag” until many years later). Obviously there were plenty of people who played bluegrass and old-time music in the area, but they didn’t hang out in the coffeehouses, which were generally the haunts of college kids. The folkies did listen to this music on record, but it wasn’t until I moved to San Francisco in the early ‘70s that I started playing with bluegrass musicians. I did learn a few of the tunes here before then, starting with “Allegheny County”, which my friend Dan McCorison played as a flatpicking tune (this is very similar to the well known “Sugarfoot Rag”, but if Dan borrowed the melody it was done unconsciously). My main source for everything I was arranging in those days was records. Franklin George’s classic record on Kanawha was the source for “Boatman” and “Angelina Baker”, which both originally entered the OTM repertoire via the minstrel stage, as well as the Irish tune, “Temperance Reel”. I learned “Fisher’s Hornpipe” from another great LP, by Byron Berline with The Dillards, and Nathan Abshire’s “The Old Folks Polka” from an Arhoolie record called “Cajun Fais Do Do”. “Silver Bells” is another tune I learned from a record in those early days, though it was not the fiddle version of this old pop song I heard, but a New Orleans jazz record lead by trombonist Jim Robinson. 

 

One tune that I learned playing with bluegrass fiddler Greg Roberts in San Francisco in the mid-70s was his version ”Ragtime Annie”. I did learn to flatpack a lot of other tunes playing with Greg and banjoist Tom Coe in those days, but never figured out fingerpicking versions of most of them. However it was during my SF years that I met banjoist Art Rosenbaum, who taught me to play  “The Drunken Wagoner”, the signature tune of the great Nebraska fiddler Uncle Bob Walters. He also taught me his setting of “Green Fields Of America” when we were on tour together in 1976. By that time I was living back in Richmond, VA, and a local singer/guitarist named Ann Allen was being courted by the great Cajun accordionist Mark Savoy. I got Mark to show me his setting of “Mardi Gras Dance”, though this one underwent considerable folk processing in my hands (as did a couple of the tunes named above – I became less free about altering the tunes as time went on). 

 

I met the superb fiddler Frank Ferrell in Seattle while on the road during this period, and we thought it would be fun to perform together as a duo. We never managed to do much of that but I did learn “The Cuckoo’s Nest”, “Midnight on the Water”, and “Robinson County” from Frank. I am very partial to this setting of the last tune, which is more syncopated than most versions. I had gotten to know Tim O’Brien when I was living in Boulder, CO briefly in 1975. He had made his first record and included the irresistible “Kit’s Waltz” on it. I, like many others, fell in love with the tune, and got him to show it to me. The music scene in Boulder and Denver was very active, and among the people I met and played with there besides Tim O’Brien were Dan Sadowski, Chaz Leary, and Pat Donohue. I also met blues guitarist Jerry Ricks, and when I wound up moving to Turin, Italy a few years later, was surprised to learn that Jerry had also landed there. Since he lived not far from me, we got together most days when we were both in town, and it would take a book to relate all the things I absorbed from being around that wonderful character. Some of this was about books on African American history that I borrowed, and conversations about art, literature, and our impressions of Italian food, wine, and belle ragazze. And then there were all the stories about the old blues guys Jerry had known, like Son House, John Hurt, Skip James, Lightning Hopkins, and many others. But Jerry had also been very close to Doc Watson, and learned many of Doc’s flatpicking settings of fiddle tunes, several of which I arranged for fingerstyle: “Blackberry Blossom”, “June Apple”, “Little Beggar Man”, “Salt Creek”, “Whistling Rufus”. Years later, when I played my versions of a couple of these for Doc, his comment was “somebody HIDE the guitar from that boy!”.  Jerry also taught me a couple of gospel songs, including “I Shall Arise and Come to Jesus” which is included here.

 

When I moved back to San Francisco in 1986, I moved in with my old friend Hal Hughes, whose musical interests range from traditional Irish and Old Time music to modern classical and free improvisation. Hal plays fiddle, banjo, guitar, bass, trumpet, and piano, and is also a prodigious composer, especially of fiddle tunes. His main playing partner in those days was banjoist Joel Orez, with whom he played fiddle, and since I was right there I joined in and we played out a bit in the Bay Area as The Beamish Boys. I learned quite a few tunes in this context, several of which I eventually arranged as solos. Four of these are included here, including the familiar  “Over the Waterfall” and “Ducks On The Pond” as well as the less common (in the US) “Battle Cry of Munster”, which we learned from another Franklin George record. Of particular interest is “Polly Put The Kettle On”, which comes from the repertoire of Manco Sneed, the virtuosic fiddler who developed elaborate versions of many of the tunes he played because he lived most of his life in relative isolation from other OT musicians, on Cherokee tribal lands in western North Carolina.

 

I learned Fiddling Arthur Smith’s ”Peacock Rag” from John Renbourn to play together during the mid to late-1980s, when we were touring together as a duo fairly regularly. John would have gotten this one from fiddler Sue Draheim when they were an item, and he noticed how well it fit with “Robinson County”. Interestingly, Smith had two versions of ”Peacock”, and they are different enough that musicians who want to play the tune together need to be sure which version they are playing, even if they all learned if from the source! 

 

Of the tunes learned from records, I should note that this unique version of “Sandy River Belle” is the one worked out by Virginia fiddler Buddy Pendleton. And “Pappy Taylor’s Hornpipe” is a midwestern variant on the Irish reel “The Silver Spear”, that I learned from the first LP by the exemplary revivalist band, the Indian Creek Delta Boys. Finally there are songs like “The Battle Cry of Freedom” and “Buffalo Gals”, which people my age grew up hearing from such an early age that they had internalized them long before they learned to play instruments, and it would be impossible to know the sources. I do, however, know where I first heard “The Keel Row”, because my mother, Barbara Martin Baker, liked to play it on the piano for her own enjoyment.

 

Duck Baker

Reading, Berks

July 2021