Cumberland Gap

The Cumberland Gap is a notch in the mountains where Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee meet, and Daniel Boone's party of axmen cut the Wilderness Road through it in 1775. Some two hundred thousand settlers walked west through it over the next quarter century, and armies traded it back and forth during the Civil War. A place that many people passed through was always going to have a tune.

Nobody knows how old this one is. Alan Jabbour, who collected fiddlers for the Library of Congress, put it well back in the nineteenth century, and he found 32 recordings of it in the Library's archive alone. Horace Kephart printed verses of the song in Our Southern Highlanders in 1913. Uncle Am Stuart of Morristown, Tennessee, made the first record of it in 1924, and within two months Land Norris had sung it with a banjo and Gid Tanner had played it with Riley Puckett. Bascom Lamar Lunsford thought it might be an old Scottish ballad tune played fast, and that is a guess.

It kept traveling after the fiddlers. Woody Guthrie sang it in the 1940s, Flatt and Scruggs recorded it in 1961, and Lonnie Donegan took a skiffle version of it to number one in Britain in 1957. Jams play it in G, where the early fiddle records have it. Tommy Jarrell's version in D, in a cross tuning, has a third strain and goes its own way.

On a mandolin in G the low strain starts on the d at the fifth fret of the A course and runs down the scale to the G, then drops an octave to the open D course for the answer. The high strain lives on the E course, climbing to the b at the seventh fret, and the A minor bar is where the hand has to stretch. Play the two strains against each other slowly until the jump between the octaves feels like one move.