Big Sciota

Big Sciota is named after a river. The Scioto rises in central Ohio, runs through Columbus and empties into the Ohio, and the tune has been spelled Sciota, Sciote and Scioty depending on who wrote it down. Nobody ever standardized it, so all four spellings turn up in tune books and none of them is wrong.

The playing goes back to Burl Hammons of Marlinton, West Virginia, who said he learned it from his uncle Pete. Collectors recorded him more than once and he never played it the same way twice. Shaking Down the Acorns, the 1973 Rounder album drawn from the Hammons family, is where most people first heard it. What Hammons played was crooked in the old-time way, with bars running whatever length they wanted.

How it reached bluegrass is unusually well documented. The harmonica player Mark Graham taught it to the guitarist Russ Barenberg, and Barenberg recorded it in 1993 on Skip, Hop and Wobble with Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush and Edgar Meyer. That reading squared the tune into two even eight bar strains, and it is the version a jam calls today. Twenty years after the Hammons recordings, the tune got remade in a Nashville studio, and that remake is what this page writes out.

On a mandolin the first strain is a stream of eighth notes that circles the G at the fifth fret of the D course and keeps coming down A, G, E, D onto the open D. There is almost no rest in it, so the work is all in the right hand: keep a strict down up going and let the course crossings happen inside it. The second strain jumps a full octave, opens by running up to the b at the seventh fret of the E course, and sits on E minor for two bars in the middle before it comes home. Three of the four phrases close with the same eight notes, B, A, G, B down to A, G, E, D, and the bar that answers them closes all four, so a good part of the tune is learned once and played four times.