Over the Waterfall

The tune reached the modern old-time world through Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, whose playing Alan Jabbour recorded in the 1960s. Reed was in his eighties by then and carried a repertoire that went back to the fiddlers he had learned from in the nineteenth century, and the recordings Jabbour made fed straight into the revival. A great deal of what a young player picks up at an old-time jam today came out of that one front room.

Where the melody came from before Reed is less settled. One collection traces it to an 1860s song called "The Fellow that Looks Like Me", but that is a lead, not a conclusion, and the tune may well be older than that. Nobody has pinned down an origin. Where it ended up is plain enough: it is now one of the most called tunes at old-time jams anywhere, and a room full of strangers will usually agree on this one.

On a mandolin the A part climbs to a peak and falls off it: the F sharp and a at the second and fifth frets of the E course, dropping back down through g-f sharp-e. The seventh bar is the one everybody remembers. The key signature says C sharp and the tune says otherwise. A C natural arrives over a C chord, falls through B to A, and lands on a held G that takes up most of the bar. One borrowed bar. The B part sits lower, hammering the open A course with B answering over the G chord, and dips to the open D at the cadence. That C natural lives at the third fret of the A course. Give it its full length and do not hurry past it.