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He Could Fiddle His Wiy Out of Jail: Ray Knight of Dahlonega
- University of Georgia Press
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He Could Fiddle HisWiyOut ofJail RAY KNIGHT OF DAHLONEGA » AY KNIGHT, singer and guitar picker of the old gold-mining town of Dahlonega, is just turning forty; yet he is proud to classify himself an old-timer. He will ask you if you know what an old-timer is and toss back the answer: "In between an antique and a living legend." Full of jokes, stories, and songs, he can talk for hours about his "idol," the late L. D. Snipes, the peripatetic Georgia fiddler who could play the fiddle twenty-one different ways, and was "the only man I knew who could fiddle his way out of jail." I had heard the story before but knew Ray was ready to tell it again. "Fiddle his way out of jail? You saw him?" I asked. "I saw him." "How did that go?" "Went pretty big, Art. There's a big crowd in town." "What do you mean fiddling his way out of jail? How did he get in jail in the first place?" "Well," Ray answered, "he's drunk, in a few cases, y'know. He wrote the song 'Dawsonville Jail' with Shorty [Lunsford]over in Dawson County about thirty odd years ago. There was the high sheriff Glen Wallace raisin' chickens on the chicken farm." Snipes and Lunsford had been living out on the farm, working for Wallace. "These boys go uptown, get too much to drink, and Toy, the chief deputy, lived at the jail, put 'em in jail. They'd get that fiddle and guitar and you never seen such a crowd in front of the jailhouse, to see their idol. I ain't no different; I was one of his idols too, I idolized him." Snipes had worked with such noted musicians as Gid Tanner and Earl Johnson, and the homemade tapes he left to his friends show him to have been a masterful player of the old-timelong-bow Georgia fiddle style, and a first-rate singer. He was difficult to line up for commercial recording sessions, so his fame was spread through radio appearances, theater shows, and spontaneous visits to taverns, homes, and farmers' markets, where he was always ready with a quip and a tune. Ray was a boy when he first heard him, and remembers that later Snipes "come to our house in Gainesville, in 1960, and said that he would teach me the Riley Puckett style [on guitar] in a couple of years. He said he'd teach me the L. D. Snipes lick on the fiddle in three years, if we could be together. And, my God, I never see'd the man 't could equal him yet. Twenty-one different ways, can you imagine that? Trick fiddle—I've seen him take that thing over his head, play it behind his back, lay down on the floor, put it between his legs, take his shoes off, put the bow in his toes, play one." Ray added that, while others pick an easy tune like "Pop Goes the Weasel" for this kind of stunt, Snipes "picked one that was sure enough difficult, 'Johnny Get Your Gun.' He could also play a banjer, a guitar, the saw, trained every wife he had [to play back-up guitar]—he'd been married three or four times." L. D. Snipes was an "excellent cabinet maker," according to Ray. "Another weird thing that he done, the way he set up a fiddle with a split bridge, I don't know what he done that for. Put a gut string on, tune it a fret below. And he'd clean and polish the fiddle with oxblood shoe polish." "Now you say Snipes was a great entertainer." "Lord, I went to visit him at Cumming, when he run the mill house. I said, 'L. D., I ain't hear'd none of that good fiddlin' since I was a kid, could you play me some?' Said, I'll play y' a tape, Stella's been in the hospital, and things have been rough around here, I been doin' the cookin', I dropped a biscuit on my toe, it's good for throwin' at 206 He Could Fiddle His Way Out of Jail R i i ._ [174.129.93.231] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:43 GMT) the neighbors if you ain't gettin' along, but it ain't eatable/ I remember one time in '52, '53, when Unicoi was on [prisoners were building the...