AceHistoryDesk – Today in History – James Henry Neel Reed, known as Henry Reed, was born on April 28, 1884, in the Appalachian Mountains of Monroe County, West Virginia. Reed was a master fiddler, banjoist, and harmonica player whose impressive repertoire consisted of hundreds of tunes, as well as multiple performance styles. His music conveyed tradition while setting new directions and became a touchstone for academic research into the history of U.S. fiddle music.

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Henry Reed was the narrow neck in the hourglass of tradition,
through which tunes were guided
back out into the wider currents of circulation.

Alan Jabbournormal

Henry Reed

Henry Reed learned the overwhelming majority of his tunes by ear and retained them by memory. He learned from elderly musicians such as Quince Dillion, who was born around 1810 and served as a fifer in the Mexican War and the Civil War. As a youngster, Reed learned to read music, played alto horn in a local band, and picked up a few additional tunes from sheet music. Though he never played professionally, he played occasionally for local dances and in countless home music sessions. Musical talent ran in his family; several of Reed’s children accompanied him.

Reed’s musical influence broadened significantly after 1966 when Karen and Alan Jabbour, graduate students at Duke University, began to audiotape his fiddling.

Although he originally recorded Henry Reed for academic purposes, Alan Jabbour, an accomplished fiddler himself, also introduced members of the Hollow Rock String Band to the tapes. Tunes such as “Over the Waterfall,” “Kitchen Girl,” and “George Booker” soon became core elements of the band’s repertoire, and Reed’s name was credited. Since the band was at the epicenter of an old-time instrumental music revival that emerged in the Durham/Chapel Hill, North Carolinaarea in the late 1960s, Reed’s music was passed from musician to musician through Jabbour’s audiotapes as well as at fiddlers’ conventions, festivals, and jam sessions. At the age of eighty-three, Reed began to enjoy wider recognition for a lifetime’s labor of love.

The titles of Henry Reed’s fiddle tunes are redolent of the old Appalachian frontier. Tunes such as “Cabin Creek” and “Shooting Creek” commemorate the arterial network of Appalachian rivers and creeks. “Forked Deer,” “Ducks in the Pond,” and “Hell Among the Yearlings” evoke the woods and countryside. “Santa Anna’s Retreat” and “British Field March” conjure up episodes in American military history.

The many recordings of Henry Reed, along with Alan Jabbour’s transcriptions, exemplify a complex syncopated bowing style used by fiddlers from Virginia to Texas.

This style of fiddling, an important feature of American musical culture in the twentieth century, appears to have evolved in the Upper South and spread with westward migration. The style’s syncopated patterns reveal an African-American influence that first appeared during the early 1800s, when perhaps half the fiddlers in the Upper South were African American. Syncopated patterns have influenced the shape of American music ever since—from the minstrel stage of the 1840s through ragtime, blues, jazz, country music, and rock-and-roll. “Georgia Camp Meeting” for example, was intended originally for the “cake walk,” a popular dance of the ragtime era.

The melodic style of many of Reed’s tunes such as “Shady Grove,” “Cluck Old Hen,” or “Betty Likens” also suggests the influence of Native American music from the Eastern Woodlands and Plains. In contrast to the typical European tonal pattern, these tunes begin in a high pitch and cascade downward.

Henry Reed’s music descends directly from the early fiddlers of the Upper South, both black and white, who achieved a dramatic cultural synthesis of European, African and, possibly, Native American musical forms and patterns. Together these musicians helped to create and shape the character of what some claim is America’s greatest cultural contribution to the world: American music. Fiddler Henry Reed, who died on February 8, 1968, embodied that music’s varied vitality and ensured its continuance.

Learn More

• Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection is a field collection of traditional fiddle tunes performed by Henry Reed. These tunes evoke the history and spirit of Virginia’s Appalachian frontier. Some strains lay dormant, in the repertory of a few elder musicians, until their rediscovery and wider circulation by the next generation. Listen to Reed’s version of “Salt River,” a tune recorded by Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys in 1964 under the title “Salt Creek,” and the piece “Breakdown in A” which joined the modern bluegrass repertory after Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys recorded it as “Clinch Mountain Backstep.”
• Uncover the historical and musicological dimensions of Henry Reed’s tunes by reading the “NOTES” written in item records in Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection. For example, the bibliographic records for “Santa Anna’s Retreat” and “West Virginia Gals” contain fascinating details about each piece.
• Get “goin’ down to Cripple Creek and have some fun” by comparing Henry Reed’s version of “Cripple Creek” in Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection with a banjo version in Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia. Compare Henry Reed’s version of “Barbara Allen” with accompanied and unaccompanied vocal versions by:
  • Lois and Nathan Judd in Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940 to 1941
  • Hule “Queen” Hines in Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip
  • Virginia Meade in California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties.
• Many people use sheet music to learn tunes that Reed most likely acquired by attentive listening. View the sheet music for nineteenth and early twentieth-century tunes such as “My Little Girl ,” “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder,” and “Arkansas Traveler” in Historic American Sheet Music from Duke University Libraries. Then, search on these same titles in Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection to hear Reed’s uniquely rendered versions.
• The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress has digitized many of its collections. Some of the music collections are:
  • Hispano Music & Culture from the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection
  • Omaha Indian Music
  • Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940 to 1950
  • Captain Pearl R. Nye: Life on the Ohio and Erie Canal
  • California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell
  • Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip
• Search on Monroe County, West Virginia, in Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey for black-and-white photographs and data pages for a variety of buildings.

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