Katy Hill

Katy Hill was a fiddle tune long before it was a bluegrass one. The Traditional Tune Archive tracks it through Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, northeast Alabama, Missouri and Nebraska, and it was played often enough in one corner of the South to be listed in the reports of the DeKalb County fiddlers' convention in Alabama every year from 1926 to 1931. Ellen Sisson recorded it in 1925 and Bill Chitwood in 1927. The north Georgia fiddler Lowe Stokes cut it in 1928 with Riley Puckett and Fate Norris, and it became the tune people knew him for. Stokes remembered his father playing it, but he said he learned it from the Alabama fiddler Joe Lee, who he called the best old time fiddler he ever heard and who was too nervous on a stage to win anything.

What made it a standard was radio. Fiddlin' Arthur Smith carried it on the Grand Ole Opry, and Bill Monroe recorded it in 1940 with Howdy Forrester on fiddle. Most of what gets played at a jam today comes down from that record, one way or another, which is why the tune has a reputation for speed. Nobody has ever found out who Katy was.

Two things people say about this tune should be heard as stories, not as facts. Tommy Jarrell told an interviewer in 1982 that he thought the melody came out of Piney Woods Gal and that Sally Johnson came out of Katy Hill, and that all three are played about the same. That is a fiddler's ear talking, and Mark Wilson has argued the opposite: that Katy Hill and Sally Johnson began as separate tunes with only a rough family likeness in the high strain, and that Opry fiddlers pushing both of them faster and faster as showpieces is what wore them into near twins. The other story is Chubby Wise driving overnight to Nashville, playing Katy Hill for Monroe cold, and being hired on the spot. It comes from the West Virginia fiddler Woody Simmons by way of a 1979 magazine, told at second hand, and it is a good story rather than a document.

The page carries two eight bar strains, played AABB, which is the form three of the printed collections use and the one a jam calls. The first strain sits high and turns on a held d, and the second drops onto a held B and works its way down through the same cadence twice. Both halves end with the same four notes, D, E, G, B, walking up to the landing, so the tune keeps handing you the same doorway.

On a mandolin the low end is the open D course and the top is the b at the seventh fret of the E course, which is the one note that asks for the little finger. Everything else is under the hand. The tune is all eighth notes and no rests, so the work is entirely in the right hand: keep a strict down up going and let the string crossings happen inside it. The first strain crosses courses on almost every beat, e, g, d, g and then d, e, g, a, and taking it slowly enough that the pick never has to hunt is what turns this from a scramble into a tune.