Tennessee Wagoner

Tennessee Wagoner is one branch of a big family. The Traditional Tune Archive files it beside Wagoner and its versions and says the state in its name changes with the place, and commenters on thesession.org report it as Texas Wagoner, Johnny Wagoner, and Reel Marie up in Canada. Samuel Bayard and R. P. Christeson both traced it to an older tune, the Belle of Claremont Hornpipe, and Bayard heard pieces of older music inside it, Billy in the Lowground in the first strain and the Scottish air The Gaberlunzie Man in the second.

It sits near the start of the Grand Ole Opry by one account. Uncle Jimmy Thompson, a fiddler born in 1848, had it in his repertoire, and the Archive, citing Wolfe, says it was the first tune Thompson played on Nashville's WSM in November 1923, at the very start of what became the Opry. Vance Randolph recorded it from Ozark fiddlers for the Library of Congress in the early 1940s, Christeson recorded the Missouri fiddler Bill Driver playing it in 1948, and the Black string band of John Lusk played a relative of it on the Cumberland Plateau as Rolling River.

Tunes in C are rare at a bluegrass jam, and that is the draw here. The first strain sits on a high e and keeps falling back to c, then climbs from c to g and drops through the G chord. The second strain starts down on the low C and walks all the way to the open G course and back up, which is the lowest a mandolin goes. Both strains close on the same figure, e, c, B, c, so a jam always knows where the turn is.

The setting is built from what the fiddle versions share, with their double stops taken down to one line for the mandolin. The held notes stay held at the top of the bar and the eighths move in between. Watch the third bar of the second strain: D, C, B, A, G runs down onto the open G course and straight back up, and the fingers have to be there before the pick is. Set the metronome slow for that run and the rest of the tune follows.