Cold Frosty Morning

Most jams know this tune from the old-time revival, and the revival learned it from one man. Henry Reed was a fiddler from Glen Lyn, in Giles County, Virginia, born in the 1880s, and in the 1960s the folklorist Alan Jabbour recorded him playing it under the name Frosty Morning. Jabbour played it with the Hollow Rock String Band in the late 1960s, the Fuzzy Mountain String Band recorded it in 1972, and from there it went into the fiddle books and onto the jam lists. Somewhere along the way it picked up the word Cold, and the Traditional Tune Archive notes that the longer title belongs, strictly, to other tunes.

Jabbour's own note on his recording is candid about how little is known. He wrote that it sounds like a classic fiddle tune of the old frontier, but that he could find no clear variant of it anywhere else. Reed started it on the high strain, the way many fiddlers in the Upper South started their tunes, near the top of the range. A tune by the name was mentioned in an account of a 1931 fiddle contest in LaFollette, Tennessee, and whether that was this tune nobody can now say. A story that it remembers the Battle of Culloden turns up online, with nothing behind it.

It is a dorian tune, which is the sound that makes it. The tonic is A and the third is a C natural, so it is minor, but the sixth is an F sharp, the note a natural minor would flatten, and that bright sixth in the high strain is what keeps it from sounding sad. Cluck Old Hen on this shelf is dorian too. The chords are Am and G and nothing else, which is how a jam plays it.

On a mandolin in first position the low strain lives on the D and A courses and the high strain climbs onto the E course, reaching the b at the seventh fret in its second bar. This setting fills the tune the way a mandolin player does at a jam, with eighth notes in the gaps where the fiddle books hold a note. The shuffles in the high strain's fifth and sixth bars, a long note and two short ones on the same pitch, want an even down, up, down, and they are where the tune gets its drive.