Mississippi Sawyer

The name is river language before it is anything else. A sawyer was a tree that had come loose upstream and lodged in the bed of the Mississippi, where the current worked it up and down like a saw, waiting to open the bottom of a steamboat. Riverboat men had a whole vocabulary for the things that could kill them, and this was one of the words. How a fiddle tune came to carry it, nobody wrote down, which is the usual state of affairs with tune names.

The melody is old enough that it has relatives. Cousins of it turn up under other names across the southern repertoire, and John Salyer of Kentucky played a close one as Fish on a Snag, which points to a family of river tunes, not a single tune that happened to get a title. The written record also disagrees with itself in one spot. Some older players take the third and fourth bars of the B part over a C natural chord, the archaic reading, where a modern jam plays a C sharp over A. The page carries the modern reading, because that is what the room will play, but the older one is not a mistake.

On a mandolin this one lives on the top two courses and never touches the bottom half of the instrument. The A part hammers the high a at the fifth fret of the E course against the F sharp three frets below it and peaks on the b at the seventh fret, the highest note in the tune and the only place the hand reaches past first position. The B part drops to rock a d-f sharp-e figure across the A and E courses, dips as far as the open A, then climbs back up through d-e-f sharp-g. Both parts finish with the same g-f sharp-e-d run into the cadence. There is nothing clever in it. Drive carries the tune, and it rewards a right hand that does not let up.