On November 24, 1874, Joseph F. Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, was granted a patent for fencing material consisting of barbs wrapped around a single strand of wire and held in place by twisting that strand around another. His original double-strand design, the Winner, lived up to its name; it is the most commercially successful of the hundreds of eventual barbed wire designs. Glidden was also the winner in a welter of litigation that reached all the way to the Supreme Court after some dozen other inventors claimed legal priority. Barbed wire was not immediately successful in Texas and elsewhere, especially with smaller cattle ranchers who depended on an 'open range' to sustain their operations. Their opposition led to the barbed wire conflicts of the 1880's, but eventually the ranges were fenced off. Although open range became a thing of the past, barbed wire helped cattlemen to breed herds in protected environments, thus negating the reliance on long-horned cattle that were more suitable to the open range.
Although we are not trained musicologists and make no pretense to the profession, we have tried to apply such professional rigors to this Semantic Abc Web as we have internalized through our own formal and informal education.
This demands the gathering of as much information as possible about folk pieces to attempt to trace tune families, determine origins, influences and patterns of aural/oral transmittal, and to study individual and regional styles of performance.
Many musicians, like ourselves, are simply curious about titles, origins, sources and anecdotes regarding the music they play. Who, for example, can resist the urge to know where the title Blowzabella came from or what it means, or speculating on the motivations for naming a perfectly respectable tune Bloody Oul' Hag, is it Tay Ye Want?
Knowing the history of the melody we play, or at least to have a sense of its historical and social context, makes the tune 'present' in the here and now, and enhances our rendering of it.
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The Fiddler's Companion.