Annotation:Laurel Lonesome

{{TuneAnnotation |f_tune_annotation_title=https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Laurel_Lonesome > |f_annotation=LAUREL LONESOME. American, Reel (cut time). A Major. AEAc# tuning (fiddle). ABB. The tune is sourced to the great-uncle of Madison County, western North Carolina, fiddler, folklorist, lawyer and entrepreneur [[Wikipedia:Bascom_Lamar_Lunsford] (1882-1973). In a concert performance recorded in 1935 at Columbia University, Lunsford prefaced his playing with the following:

Laurel Lonesome, a fiddle tune. My great uncle Os Deaver, who lived at the Forks of Ivy--and there's Little Ivy and Big Ivy, in Madison County--when [he was] a young man lost a valuable horse. And he trailed it to Shelton Laurel, and he went over to find the horse...he failed to find it on Laurel...but he spent that night at a mountain home, and while he was playing "Laurel Lonesome", a drunken women raised up and said, 'Os, I want you to play the lonesome tune one time more.' So he always said he got a name for his fiddle tune which he had made. "Laurel Lonesome."

Shelton Laurel is the name of a creek and, in the mid-19th century, a small community (consisting of self-sufficient farm houses but no businesses) in Madison County (named for the Shelton family). It was the site of a massacre in 1863, when Confederate troops chasing raiding Union sympathizers (of which there were many in the area) captured a group of men and executed thirteen of them, including three boys ages 12, 14 and 17. |f_source_for_notated_version= |f_printed_sources= |f_recorded_sources= |f_see_also_listing=Hear a concert recording from a performance by Bascom Lamar Lunsford at Columbia University in 1935 at Berea Sound Archives [1]
Hear Bruce Greene's version of the tune at Slippery Hill [2]
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