Sourwood Mountain

Sourwood Mountain was a song before it was a fiddle tune, and it has been collected all over the South, most often from banjo players. The Traditional Tune Archive says it was long used as a play-party melody. The verses are comic and they float: a girl at the head of the holler who won't come, and a singer who won't follow, with a nonsense refrain between every line. Cecil Sharp took down a version from Will Biggers in Rome, Georgia, in August 1913.

Nobody knows who made it. Family lore in Russell County, Virginia, credits a fiddler named William Francis Combs, called Blue Bill, who was born in 1840 and was with Lee at Appomattox. The North Carolina fiddler Bill Hensley, who played it for the collector David Bennett in 1939, said it came from a Virginia fiddler, Blind Wiley Laws. Both are stories and are told here as stories. The written record is plainer. The tune was on the Berea, Kentucky, lists of fiddlers' tunes in 1915, and Fiddlin' Cowan Powers recorded it for Victor in 1924, the same year Uncle Am Stuart made a record of it for Vocalion.

The field recordings made after that are where this page comes from. Marion Reece played it for John Lomax in 1936, John Salyer's sons recorded him at home in Kentucky in 1941 and 1942, and Edden Hammons was recorded in West Virginia in 1947. Several of those fiddlers tuned to A, E, A, E so the open strings rang under the tune, and all of them played the same two short strains: a high one that rocks on the e and a low one that drops to the bottom of the fiddle.

On a mandolin both strains start on the c sharp at the fourth fret of the A course and lean on the open E course above it. The first bar crosses between those two courses on nearly every note, so keep the pick close to the strings and let the crossing happen inside a steady down, up. The second strain goes the other way, down to the F sharp and E on the D course, and it closes on the same turn as the first, e, c sharp, B, G sharp into A. The G sharp sits at the sixth fret of the D course, the one reach in the tune.