Annotation:Laurel Lonesome
LAUREL LONESOME. American, Reel (cut time). A Major. AEAc# tuning (fiddle). ABB. The tune is sourced to the great-uncle of Madison County, western North Carolina, fiddler, folklorist, lawyer and entrepreneur Wikipedia:Bascom_Lamar_Lunsford (1882-1973). In a concert performance recorded in 1935 at Columbia University, Lunsford prefaced his playing with the following:
Laurel Lonesome, a fiddle tune. My great uncle Os Deaver, who lived at the Forks of Ivy--and there's Little Ivy and Big Ivy, in Madison County--when [he was] a young man lost a valuable horse. And he trailed it to Shelton Laurel, and he went over to find the horse...he failed to find it on Laurel...but he spent that night at a mountain home, and while he was playing "Laurel Lonesome", a drunken women raised up and said, 'Os, I want you to play the lonesome tune one time more.' So he always said he got a name for his fiddle tune which he had made. "Laurel Lonesome."
Shelton Laurel is the name of a creek and, in the mid-19th century, a small community (consisting of self-sufficient farm houses but no businesses) in Madison County (named for the Shelton family). It was the site of a massacre in 1863, when Confederate troops chasing raiding Union sympathizers (of which there were many in the area) captured a group of men and executed thirteen of them, including three boys ages 12, 14 and 17.
