Annotation:California Cotillion

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CALIFORNIA COTILLION. Old-Time, Cotillion or March. G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AA'BB'. "California Cotillion" comes from the Ballard Branch Bogtrotters' recording for the AFS/Library of Congress, around 1941. Galax, Va., fiddler Eck Dunford remarked to the collector Lomax that he learned "California Cotillion" from a fellow Galax musician, Hicks Ring, who had moved to Nebraska, then returned with "tunes he learned from the Germans." The name California was given to the land on the Pacific coast of North America, supposedly by Cortez, who officially called it Santa Cruz. Cortez mistakenly thought the rather parched bit of real estate was an island (i.e. Baja California) and he and his men began to refer to it as California after a Spanish romance book about an island populated by women.

Source for notated version: Jere Canote [Phillips].

Printed sources: Phillips (Traditional American Fiddle Tunes), vol. 2, 1995; p. 27.

Recorded sources:

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