Annotation:Wooliver's Money Musk
WOOLIVER’S MONEY MUSK. American, Reel (cut time). A Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AA'BBCC. The tune is named for fiddler and guitar player Roy Wooliver (c. 1900?-1964), from Dent County, Missouri, southwest of St. Louis, whose playing influenced several Missouri fiddlers, including Gene Goforth, John Hartford, Howe Teague and Clifford Hawthorne. Wooliver had the reputation of being a drifter who worked odd jobs, sometimes supplemented by petty theft (it is said he was imprisoned twice for stealing the same watch). Family lore has it that Roy was in the Dent County jail for a time for some infraction, and his mother Melvina attemtpted to get him out by trying to burn down the court house [1]. It is said he had a vast repertoire but never owned a fiddle. Howard Marshall records that Wooliver occasionally played over various live AM radio shows in the St.Louis area, including Cousin Emmy's show over KMOX, and categorizes his fiddling style as 'central Missouri', not an Ozarks style.
The title references the 18th century Scottish strathspey "Money Musk" ("Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk"), a title that occasionally has been collected in tradition in the American South and Southwest (c.f. Va. fiddler Henry Reed's "Money Musk"), imported, at least in name, by Scots-Irish immigrants. However, Wooliver's tune has little musical relation to the Scottish tune.