Fiddle Tunes from Mississippi

Commercial and Informal Recordings, 1920-2018

Harry Bolick, Tony Russell

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781496835895
  9781496835796
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496835826
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Folk Music

In 2015 University Press of Mississippi published Mississippi Fiddle Tunes and Songs from the 1930s by Harry Bolick and Stephen T. Austin to critical acclaim and commercial success. Roughly half of Mississippi's rich, old-time fiddle tradition was documented in that volume and Harry Bolick has spent the intervening years working on this book, its sequel.

Beginning with Tony Russell's original mid-1970s fieldwork as a reference, and later working with Russell, Bolick located and transcribed all of the Mississippi 78 rpm string band recordings. Some of the recording artists like the Leake County Revelers, Hoyt Ming and His Pep Steppers, and Narmour & Smith had been well known in the state. Others, like the Collier Trio, were obscure. This collecting work was followed by many field trips to Mississippi searching for and locating the children and grandchildren of the musicians. Previously unheard recordings and stories, unseen photographs and discoveries of nearly unknown local fiddlers, such as Jabe Dillon, John Gatwood, Claude Kennedy, and Homer Grice, followed. The results are now available in this second, companion volume, Fiddle Tunes from Mississippi: Commercial and Informal Recordings, 1920–2018.

Two hundred and seventy musical examples supplement the biographies and photographs of the thirty-five artists documented here. Music comes from commercial recordings and small pressings of 78 rpm, 45 rpm, and LP records; collectors' field recordings; and the musicians' own home tape and disc recordings. Taken together, these two volumes represent a delightfully comprehensive survey of Mississippi's fiddle tunes.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Fiddle Tunes from MISSISSIPPI
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Introduction
• Doc Bailey Talent Scout, Winona
• Communities of Fiddlers in Mississippi
• The Segregation of Sound: Unheard African American Fiddlers
• About the Music
• THE MUSICIANS AND THE MUSIC
• Afterword
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS