Annotation:Fiddler's Hoedown
Tune properties and standard notation
FIDDLER'S HOEDOWN. AKA and see "Black Foot Rag," "Boone County Rag," "Dead Slave (The)." Old-Time, Breakdown. D Major (Marshall). DDae tuning (fiddle). See note for "Dead Slave (The)." It is on Missouri fiddler Charlie Walden's list of '100 essential Missouri fiddle tunes'. "Martha Campbell" is a related melody. The second strain of "Fiddler's Hoedown" is similar to the first strain of the Missouri reel "Brickyard Joe."
titles of fiddle tunes are sometimes lost or muddled by the wear and tear of time. A tune in Boone County is known as "Fiddler's Hoedown," "Black Foot Rag," and "Boone County Rag." Persinger, Pete McMahan, and Taylor McBaine remembered an older, and thankfully replaced title, "Dead Nigger." Not a comfortable subject to write about, the tune marks the lynching of an African American man in Columbia on April 29, 1923. James T. Scott was accused of attacking and attempting to rape Regina Almstedt, the white teenage daughter of University of Missouri professor B.H. Almstedt. A mob stormed the Boone County Jail and took Scott to the scene of the alleged crime several blocks away, along the KATY Railroad tracks and near the wooden Stewart Road bridge that carried traffic over the KATY railroad tracks and adjacent Providence Road. Professor Almstedt pleaded with the mob to stop, but to no avail.
When Persinger played the fiddle tune at the National Oldtime Fiddler's Contest in Weiser, Idaho, in June 1964, he used the innocuous boilerplate titles "Fiddler's Hoedown" and “Boone County Rag.” A few years later, Columbia's Pete McMahan was using the title "Black Foot Rag" as well as "Fiddler's Hoedown" and the only known commercial recording of the tune from the era is McMahan’s "Fiddler's Hoedown" (reissued on Pete McMahan, 50 Old-Time Fiddle Gems, Voyager CD 366). R.P. Christeson decided to publish the tune commemorating the stain on Columbia’s history under the title, "The Dead Slave," in his second volume of transcriptions (The Old-Time Fiddlers Repertory, 1984, #101, p. 64; Christeson’s annotation reads, “An old tune from Boone County, Missouri, which some fiddlers once called ‘The Dead Nigger.' Located and provided by Charley Walden.”)
It should be added that “Black Foot” is a traditional name for the rural community of western Boone County where Cleo Persinger grew up, and is not connected to African American history there
Source for notated version:
Printed sources:
Recorded sources: RSS MLP-38, Pete McMahan - "Missouri Fiddlin' No. 2" (198?). Missouri State Old Time Fiddler's Association 001, Pete McMahon - "Ozark Mountain Waltz." Voyager VRCD 344, Howard Marshall & John Williams - "Fiddling Missouri" (1999. From Otto Griggs of Columbia, Missouri, via Pete McMahon).