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Old Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes.

Article Excerpt
By Jeff Todd Titon. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001. [xviii, 245 p. ISBN 0-8131-2200-7. $45.] Music examples, illustrations, map, bibliography, index, compact disc.

Although fiddling is a vital folk music tradition in America, there are far fewer scholarly books on fiddling than one would expect. There are hundreds of tunebooks available from popular music presses, but generally they are written for players wanting to learn new tunes mad provide little in the way of documentation. It is rare to find a tunebook that gives good scholarly descriptions of the tunes and their origins. One example is Samuel P. Bayard's Dance to the Fiddle, March to the Fife (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982). Bayard transcribed the nines of living players in western Pennsylvania and documented the history of each tune. Titon follows a similar pattern in documenting the tunes of fiddlers from Kentucky.

Titon's book is written for two audiences: for old-time players who want to learn new tunes, and also for scholars who want to learn more about the tradition. It is primarily a tunebook, with 170 tunes (nearly two hundred transcriptions with the variants) transcribed from recordings of Kentucky fiddlers. Many of the transcriptions were made from field and home recordings found only in archival and private collections. They represent rare regional tunes and variant forms of familiar tunes not found...

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