June Apple

June Apple comes out of Round Peak, the corner of Surry County in North Carolina that has given old-time music more tunes than any other patch of ground its size. Tommy Jarrell played it, Wade Ward played it, and it traveled from that community into the general old-time repertoire the same way most Round Peak tunes did, through visitors with tape recorders. A June apple is an early ripening apple, the kind that comes in around June instead of in the fall. Nobody wrote down why the tune got the name, so anybody who tells you the story is filling in a blank.

For most of its length it is a two chord tune, A against G, and the mode is the first thing you hear. A mixolydian is A major with the seventh flattened. Here the G natural is not tucked into one passing bar, it is half the tune. The setting written out below is the American jam lineage, the one that turns up near enough identically in four independent jam books. That is a smoothed consensus of what the Round Peak players did looser and droner, and the old recordings carry more slide and more open string ring than any notation holds.

On a mandolin the A part is the high saw. It opens on a-g-e-g, repeated, then answers itself a step lower with g-f-e-f over the G chord, all of it on the top two strings and none of it above the fifth fret A on the E string. The B part drops into the middle ground of c sharp, B and A on the A course and holds the tune's one long note, the d over its only D chord, right in the middle of the strain. The left hand never has to leave first position, so the practice goes into the pick: a saw figure only sounds like a saw if every note weighs the same.