Annotation:Grandad's Favorite
X:1 T:Grandad's Favorite N:From the playing of Ernie Carpenter (1909-1997, Braxton County, N:W.Va.) Q:"Quick" M:C| L:1/8 N:AEae tuning (fiddle) D:Augusta Heritage AHR-023, Ernie Carpenter - "Old Time Fiddle Tunes from the Elk D:River Country" (2001) D:https://www.slippery-hill.com/recording/little-rose-0 Z:Transcribed by Andrew Kuntz K:A F[A2A2]A FECC|[A,2E2][A,2E2][A,E]-[A,F] A2|[de]-[e2e2]f e2c2|BABA {D}[F4A4]| F[A2A2]A FECC|E2E2{D}F2A2|[de]-[e2e2]f e2c2|BABc [AA4]:|| |:c+slide+[e2e2]f [e2e2][ee][ee]|ce-f2 f2e2|f-eaa- a2ee|aeae fe c2| e2c2 BAGE|F+slide+[A3A3][A4A4]:|
GRANDAD'S FAVORITE. American, Reel (cut time). A Major. AEae or GDgd tuning (fiddle). AABB. Braxton County, West Virginia, fiddler Ernie Carpenter (1907-1997), the source for "Grandad's Favorite," gave this introduction to the tune in Oct., 1987, at the Berea College Celebration of Traditional Music:
My grandfather was a great old-time fiddler. He spent a lot of his time back in the early days of the settlement of the little town of Sutton, where I live, when it was just'a small village. My grandfather...out of the old dugout canoes...he was a canoe-maker. And, he had a job of canoeing goods from Charleston, which was a hundred miles away, down Elk River. And he canoed all of the food and everything that they got in this little village, from Charleston up Elk River a hundred mile. And, of course they poled those canoes by hand, no such a thing as a motor at that time. He did that for many years.
One Christmas day...down there...they had certain places they would stop...stay all night or stop for the warm weather and fix them something outside...camp outside. And this one time that they came down after a load of goods and goin' back...at one of their stopping places there was a young lady at the bar [ed. - sand bar] when they landed out, and [she] had a fiddle. And she told my grandfather that she had heard that he could play a fiddle, and she was tryin' to learn to play the fiddle. She had her a fiddle and she was trying to learn and wanted to know if he show her how to tune it and play a tune for her. He did. And when he got ready to leave, why, he played a tune for her and handed her the fiddle, and they pushed up off up the river. And they got up the river a way and looked back and she was wavin' at them and crying.
But he did that job there for many, many years, well, until they got the roads up the river from Charleston to Sutton to they could haul them otherwise. These tunes that I'm playing here was tunes that he played. They were his tunes that he played. And, course he died before I started playing the fiddle, but my father was a good old-time fiddler and he played the same tunes that my grandfather played, and they've been handed down from generation to generation for years. We're going to play a tune now called "Grandad's Favor-ite."
Ernie's grandfather was William "Squirrely Bill" Carpenter (1827-1921), born on the Elk River near the mouth of Laurel Creek on a homestead later lost int he building of Sutton Lake. According to the West Virginia Encylclopedia, he build and sold dugout canoes by length at a dollar a foot, and occupied himself (when not fiddling) Not only did he learn (through his father) his grandfather's repertory, he also learned tunes that had been played by his great-great-grandfather, Jeremiah (one of the first settlers in the Elk River area), and his great-grandfather, Solomon "Old Solly" Carpenter.
