Annotation:Cider Mill

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CIDER MILL. AKA - "Cider." AKA and see "Down to the Cider Mill," "Sal's Gone Down to the Cider Mill." Old-Time, Breakdown. D Major. ADae tuning (fiddle). ABB'. A Blue Ridge dance tune, popular in Patrick County and the Galax, Va./Mt. Airy, N.C. areas. In wide circulation now having been popularized by Mt. Airy, North Carolina fiddler Tommy Jarrell and others. Related tunes include a number of titles that refer to cider/hard cider making: "Stillhouse/Old Stillhouse is Burning Down (3) (The)," "Paddy Won't You Drink Some Good Old Cider;" "Down to the Still House to Get a Little Cider." Kerry Blech traces the earliest recorded version to "Down to the Stillhouse to Get a Little Cider" by Ernest Stoneman & The Blue Ridge Corn Shuckers, recorded as part of a skit called "A Serenade in the Mountains", Part One (Victor 21518 {78RPM}, 1928).

Paul Tyler finds the following vignette in W.H. Venable's Footprints of the Pioneers of the Ohio Valley: A Centennial Sketch (1888):

The old-time apple-cutting was an occasion of unbounded mirth. . . . After the apples were cut, and the cider boiled, the floor was cleared for a "frolic," technically so-called, and merry were the dancers and loud the songs with which our fathers and mothers regaled the flying hours. The fiddler was a man of importance, and when, after midnight, he called the "Virginia Reel," such shouting, such laughter, such clatter of hilarious feet upon the sanded puncheon floor, startled the screech-owl out of doors, and waked the baby from its sweet slumber in the sugar-trough. . . . The apple-cutting was fifty years ago . . .

Source for notated version: Bruce Molsky with Bob Carlin [Phillips].

Printed sources: Phillips (Traditional American Fiddle Tunes), 1994; p. 53.

Recorded sources: County Records, Tommy Jarrell, Fred Cockerham & Oscar Jenkins - "Down to the Cider Mill." Living Folk LFR-104, Allan Block - "Alive and Well and Fiddling." Rounder 0197, Bob Carlin (with Bruce Molsky)- "Banging and Sawing" (1985).