Elzic's Farewell

French Carpenter, the Clay County fiddler who died in 1964, said this tune came down through his own family. He called it an old bagpipe tune. An ancestor named Elzic, or Elzick, had played it before he marched off to the Civil War, and he never came home. Carpenter taught it to Wilson Douglas, a younger fiddler and a distant relation who lived from 1922 to 1999, and to Gaither Carlton, and the story went along with the notes.

Jim Comstock of Richwood checked the story and printed what he found in the West Virginia Songbag in 1974. Harvey G. Elswick wrote the tune. He was born in Pike County, Kentucky in 1838, served in a Kentucky unit during the war, and moved his family to Kanawha County in 1875. In April 1889 his mother was dying and asked him to play his fiddle for her once more, and this is what he played. He lived until 1915. Comstock found no Elzic at all. Elswick wore down to Elzic somewhere between his porch and everybody else's.

The West Virginia fiddlers played two strains. The third strain, the one with the flatted notes, came out of the festival scene and is now the version most players know. Norman Blake recorded the tune in October 1984 for Lighthouse on the Shore, and flatpickers and bluegrass players picked it up from that record. Scott Nygaard and Rob Ickes have recorded it since, and so have Darol Anger and Mike Marshall as a duo. The Irish band Flook recorded it too, which is how it landed on thesession.org, where the comment thread has spent years arguing about whether it is a bluegrass tune. It is an old-time tune from West Virginia. Bluegrass players just happen to like it.

This page carries the three strain reading, AABBCC, the way a festival jam plays it. The first strain rocks on a held e and drops to the open A under it. The second sits low and works four notes, A, B, A, G, over and over before it climbs. The third leans on a d and slips an E flat in beside it. Contra dance bands often leave that third strain off and play the other two.

On a mandolin the tune runs from the open D course up to the a at the fifth fret of the E course, and the G course is never used. One note sits above the fifth fret: the E flat in the third strain, at the sixth fret of the A course. Each strain opens on a note worth three eighths and lands on one worth four, and the pick has to sit through both without drifting. In the first strain the crossing from the E course down to the A course comes right after that opening held note, so count it out instead of guessing. The third strain ties a d across the beat in four different bars. Let it ring through the tie. Picking it again is the mistake everybody makes the first week.