Appalachian music. Birdie [music transcription] - Ragtime music. Note sheet.

Meter: 4/4
Transcribed by Alan Jabbour, from a performance by Henry Reed.
Key: C
Compass: 11
Strains: 3 (high-low-higher, 8-4-8)
Rendition: 1r-2-3-2-1-2-3
Phrase Structure: ABACABDE QRQE' TUVWTUVX (aa'bc aa'de aa'bc fghi qqh'h' qqh'i' rr'st uvwx rr'st uvyy')
Stylistic features: Separate bowstrokes, especially in second strain.
Related Tune(s): Fourteen Days in Georgia
Handwritten: Total recorded: AABCBABC
Composed by White, Smith, and Perry, 1870
"Birdie" is a rag-like country tune well-known in West Virginia. But Henry Reed's three-strain version of it seems to have come about from conflating the customary strains of "Birdie" (appearing here as the third and second strains, in that order) with another tune sometimes called "Fourteen Days in Georgia" (here the first strain). The unusual phrase structure as well as the key of C signal connections to the amorphous but characteristic class of tunes here described as "rags." They seem to be of late nineteenth-century or turn-of-the-century origin and presumably have African-American associations, but they are not all derived from the ragtime repertory of popular music at the turn of the century, and they perhaps provide a glimpse into the country rags of folk tradition which may have preceded and certainly coexisted with the ragtime genre in cosmopolitan popular music.