The Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes (review)

The study of American fiddling is a curious branch of musicology and of folklore, with most contributions coming from dedicated amateurs after hours spent in careful study and who perform the music avidly. These enthusiasts are drawn from the population of "old-time" musicians best called urban revivalists. Most did not come upon this body of music through multiple generations of family connections or as an ingredient of local community life. Instead they encountered fiddling as college students or adults and latched onto it for reasons mixing various sorts of romanticism, friendship networks, and aesthetic appreciation of the music. Also, these days, more and more such fiddlers are Suzuki violin students who decamp to the fiddle world, dismaying teachers who assign fiddle tunes as elementary exercises as way stations on the inexorable march towards Paganini. While the rural inheritors of old-time fiddling are mostly blue collar, and urban revivalists remain mostly white collar, more and more overlap between these constituencies materializes as time passes. A brief visit to the Internet reveals that Clare Milliner is a lawyer by day, and Walt Koken a carpenter, and they have played in a string band with another lawyer and a retired chemist. The small publishing company, Mudthumper Music, is their own.

The authors clearly intend for this hefty volume of simple transcriptions of American fiddle tunes to be a music monument. Literally hundreds of lovers of American old-time fiddling helped in one way or another. It was supported by the Brandywine Friends of Old Time Music, the Appalachian Friends of Old Time Music, a parallel British group, and others. The resultant dignified, thick, hardback volume measures 8¼" x 12¾" and weighs in at over six pounds. The transcribed performances center on fiddling from commercial "hillbilly" recordings from the 1920s through 1940s, a goodly array of field recordings deposited at the Library of Congress in the 1930s and 1940s, and a substantial minority of other fiddle recordings that the authors favored. The core in terms of geography and style is Appalachia with secondary focuses on the Ozarks, Mississippi, New England/Quebec, and even Texas, treated gingerly (yes to Eck Robertson's fairly elaborate "Sally Johnson," no to his truly extravagant but famous "Sally Goodin"). While the tune choices are moderately eclectic, this remains a collection of old-time fiddle tunes genuinely representative of the collective taste of the broad community of urban revivalist fiddlers. The authors state that "these transcriptions were done because of a reverence for the sound of the original recordings, and a wish to preserve it" (p. iv).

The transcriptions, clearly printed for easy reading, are organized alphabetically by tune title (multiple titles for essentially the same tune are sometimes mentioned in the "comments" index, sometimes not). Most tunes are given once, though a half-dozen of what are in fact among the commonest tunes are presented in six to nine versions, and double that many in two or three versions. These are bare-bones transcriptions: no slurs, accents, double stops, glissandos, quarter tones; thus, no indications of performance practice. Since the authors carefully specify which recordings they worked from, and since many of these are available through niche commercial reissues or Internet sources, energetic and accomplished fiddlers with nuanced ears can eventually figure out how to play these versions with considerable fidelity.

Two choices the transcribers made surprised this reviewer. Key signatures reflect a tune's tonic, regardless of mode; for instance, a tune in D minor or in some other way modal (much more common than minor) will nevertheless have a signature of two sharps and lots of accidentals. There...