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Appalachian music. Natchez [Christmas Morning] [music transcription]. Note sheet.
Summary
Meter: 4/4
Transcribed by Alan Jabbour, from a performance by Henry Reed.
Key: A
Title change: The title appears on the transcription as "Natchez." It is transcribed after "Unnamed," near the bottom of the page.
Strains: 2 (high-low, 2-4)
Rendition: (1)-2-1r-2-1r-2-1r-2-1r-2
Phrase Structure: AB QR (abac qrst qrsc)
Compass: 15 (or 11 plus low A drone on G-string)
Related Tune(s): Brown's Dream
Related Tune(s): Paddy on the Turnpike
Handwritten: Played thru 5 times (minus 1st str of 1st time). Other var. (in bowing) not noted below.
This is not the usual "Natchez" (for which see AFS 13705a35), but another tune. The title became attached to the present tune by accident as Henry Reed continued to try to recollect the tune he usually called "Natchez." It is a tune in A with a consistently minorish cast that appears in sets widely but thinly distributed across the Upper South. There is no consistency to its title, and its low strain is variable and has something of the character of filler. An apparent nineteenth-century example is Coes, George H. Coes' Album of Music, p. 3 "Watermelon Jig." Twentieth-century examples are Morris, Old Time Violin Melodies #40 "The Lonesome Road"; Thede, The Fiddle Book, p. 76 "Dust in the Lane, or Cotton Pickin' Time"; and "Shelvin' Rock," a 1960s recording fiddled by French Carpenter on the LP record Old-Time Music from Clay County, West Virginia (Folk Promotions 11567-11568). Burl and Sherman Hammons of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, played a version that they called "Christmas Morning." Henry Reed, in searching for the title, once remarked that it might have been something about "Brown's Dream"; that is one of the names of another tune from the Upper South, represented in this collection under the title "Paddy on the Turnpike."