Appalachian music. Salt River [music transcription]. Note sheet.

Meter: 4/4
Strains: 2 (high-low, 4-4)
Transcribed by Alan Jabbour, from a performance by Henry Reed.
Compass: 12
Key: A
Phrase Structure: ABAC QRQS (abcd abef qrst qruf)
Related Tune(s): Paddy on the Turnpike
Rendition: 1r-2r-1r-2r-1r-2
Stylistic features: Fewer sixteenth notes, more eighth notes.
Related Tune(s): The Pateroller Song
Related Tune(s): Muddy Roads
Handwritten: Played thru 3 times. First notes missed at beginning, & last str. not repeated last time. 2nd time recorded.
"Salt River" probably refers to the river of that name in Kentucky. Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys recorded this fiddle tune in 1964 under the title "Salt Creek" (Decca 31596), modifying the original name in honor of the creek in Indiana near where Monroe held his annual Bean Blossom Festival. Monroe's banjoist, Bill Keith, apparently got the tune originally from West Virginia banjoist Don Stover. The Monroe recording has given the tune a new lease on life on the bluegrass circuit.Henry Reed's set is melodically fairly simple, suggesting the possibility that the tune was usually played as a banjo tune. He begins on the high strain, as does Hobart Smith of Saltville, Virginia, in a 1956 recording called "The Pateroller Song" (on Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, Tradition TLP 1007) that sounds similar. The tune's distribution seems to have been limited to Virginia and West Virginia before its bluegrass diffusion in the later decades of the twentieth century.See additional discussion and citations under "Muddy Roads" in The Hammons Family (Library of Congress, AFS L65-66). As a tune, "Salt River" is a scion of the large family of tunes best represented by the Irish and American reel "Paddy on the Turnpike" (see Bayard, Hill Country Tunes, #31 for comparative references).