Many old time music players are avid seekers of the technical mastery of our musical heroes. One fiddler that stands out during the folk revival of the last century was Tommy Jarrell, whom many considered to have a mystical manner of bowing. The videos you see here were made by Nancy and Rusty Neithammer using 1980’s technology to further understand the patterns and techniques of Tommy’s bowing on 14 takes.
About Tommy Jarrell
by Paul Brown
Thomas Jefferson “Tommy” Jarrell (March 1, 1901- January 28, 1985) of Surry County, North Carolina, USA was an extraordinary musician and storyteller whose banjo and fiddle styles heavily influenced thousands of old-time music enthusiasts from the early 1960s well into the 21st Century. His sharp intelligence, welcoming personality, and enthusiasm for sharing music and stories made him a standout even among his remarkable musical peers in the community where he was born and raised near the foot of Round Peak Mountain. (For further details on Round Peak playing styles and musicians of that area, please see Ray Alden’s 1973 article and other sources at this site, and further references.)
Jarrell played both fiddle and banjo in an unusual self-accompanying style. His playing reflected his own sensibilities, what he’d heard from his fiddle-playing father and uncle, and the reality of having few other fiddlers or banjoists to play with during his youth. There were no guitarists in the area when he was a child.
In his later conversations with younger musicians who flocked to visit him from around the world starting in the 1960s, he explained that he played fiddle and clawhammer banjo with the desire to do it all: support square dancing and flatfoot dancing, reflect the rhythms, phrasing and melody of a song or tune, and provide as full a sound as possible on just one instrument. He often used resonant tunings (AEAE, AEAC#, ADAE for fiddle) that allowed him to play open strings, or simply let them vibrate as he focused on melody, rhythm and drone.
Compared to many old-time fiddlers, Tommy Jarrell’s bowing style was quite complex. It caught both the ears and eyes of other players. One of them, Nancy Dols (later Nancy Neithammer), was so struck by what he accomplished with it that she wanted to visually document how he used the bow. With the help of a friend she would later marry, Rusty Neithammer, and staff at Surry Community College, she recorded the Bowing Lights video. This was done by placing Tommy in a darkened room with a small light attached to the wrist of his bow arm. Analog video technology of the time created a visible trail of light, providing a striking portrayal of how Tommy Jarrell’s bowing helped him place his distinct musical signature on the fiddle tunes he played.
The Bowing Lights Story
by Nancy Neithammer
The idea for the bowing lights technique dates back to the late 1930’s, when fiddler Johnny Gimble and his older brother Gene were learning Beaumont Rag from Daniel Huggins Williams (who recorded it on February 20, 1937 with the East Texas Serenaders). Johnny Gimble’s telling of the story was captured in Earl Spielman’s interview with Johnny on December 10, 1968, in connection with Earl’s dissertation research. Thanks to Paul Wells’ excellent memory and Michael Mendelson’s bibliographic skills, I was able to locate a 1991 reprint of the interview. Here’s the section of the interview that describes the origin of the bowing lights technique:
JG: …the first fiddle player, when we were learnin’, there was an old boy in Lindale, Texas, right out of Tyler, named Huggins Williams. He played left-handed fiddle.
ES: Did he play with the strings switched around?
JG: Yeah, they were reversed. I learned BEAUMONT RAG from him.
ES: Was that the very first tune you ever played?
JG: No, we started off with things like…do you remember COWBOY JACK and DARLIN’ NELLIE GRAY. Anyway, we learned those simple songs, and about that time Bill Boyd’s record of UNDER THE DOUBLE EAGLE was played a whole lot. I think Cecil Brower might have played fiddle on that, but I don’t know. As we went along, this double bow, you know this rocking the bow, they call it, it fascinated everybody in the family – all of us. Gene, my brother who was just older than me, played the guitar primarily. But he taught me how to double bow. He caught on to it. Do you do it?
ES: No, I don’t. I’m going to ask you to demonstrate a little bit later on.
JG: Well, I’ll tell you how we learned to do it. We watched old Huggins, everybody called him Lefty Williams. He could really play. He had recorded with a college group, the “East Texas Serenaders” or somethin’, back in the thirties. He’d just lay out there by himself and play. Anybody could go by his house and he’d help them learn or he’d just play all night. And so this BEAUMONT RAG he could really fiddle, and he did his double bowing thing and we couldn’t learn how to do it. It’s real tricky. So Gene got to watching the end of his hand. And you’d sit with your bow and start to make an almost circle and then go back.
ES: And he was holding the fiddle. . .
JG: He was holding the cigarette in his hand so you could see that fire almost make a circle. And so we did that; we went and got a cigarette and held it in our hand and watched the other one until we learned fiddlin’. And that’s been one of the tunes…I don’t know, there are about three or four tunes on the fiddle that you’ll get requests for everywhere you play: MOCKIN’ BIRD, ORANGE BLOSSOM SPECIAL, SAN ANTONIO ROSE, and BEAUMONT RAG.
[From Earl Spielman’s 12/10/68 Interview with Johnny Gimble (The Devil’s Box Volume 25 Number 3, Fall 1991, page 7)]
A few years after this interview, in the mid-1970’s, Paul Wells, Michael Mendelson, and I were graduate students at UCLA and were interested in fiddle bowing. Word got around about the bowing lights idea (Paul recalled seeing the bowing lights story in Earl Spielman’s interview with Johnny), and Michael and I experimented with using a tiny flashlight bulb connected to batteries, with the bowing lights captured on film.
A few years later, in 1982, I was living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and making frequent trips to visit Tommy Jarrell at his home in Toast, near Mt. Airy. I was especially fascinated by the way Tommy rocked the bow to create a rhythmic accompaniment to the melody, and thought that the bowing lights technique would provide an interesting view of the motions of his bowing hand.
I visited Surry Community College in Dobson and discussed the idea with Jerry Weaver and Andy Webb in the Audio-Visual Department. They didn’t have film equipment I could use, but they found an old black and white video camera that could produce an after-image if the contrast was turned up high enough, and they were willing to give it a try. Rusty Neithammer made a light apparatus and we did a test run with Rusty fiddling and it worked. We asked Tommy if he’d do it; he had lots of experience with people recording him and he agreed to give it a try.
On February 26, 1982 we made the Bowing Lights video with Tommy fiddling. Rusty’s apparatus was a small lightbulb taped to the back of Tommy’s hand, loosely connected with wires to batteries in his pocket. Each tune started with the room lights on, and then we faded the room lights into darkness. The light on Tommy’s hand left an after-image that traced the shapes of his bowing hand motion. The first two tunes were very long, because Tommy was waiting for us to tell him to stop, but by the third track we had worked that out. Jerry and Andy adjusted the zoom setting for maximum visibility, trying to keep the patterns as large as possible while staying within the frame. By the end of the session, we recorded 14 tracks.
In the fall of 1982, with the approval of Tommy, his family, Jerry Weaver, and Andy Webb, I donated the Tommy Jarrell Bowing Lights video to the Southern Folklife Collection, an archival resource of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (https://library.unc.edu/wilson/sfc/
Notes on the Tunes
by Brad Leftwich
A number of these tunes were popular in the Round Peak community and the wider area beyond, and are common enough that Tommy felt no need to remark where he learned them. However, there’s no question that the fiddlers who most influenced his own playing were his father, Ben Jarrell (1880-1946), and his uncle, Charlie Jarrell (1874-1943), and we can assume that he learned many of his unattributed tunes from them.
1. Little Stream of Whiskey (key of C, tuned GDAE). The origins of this tune are obscure; also known as “The Dying Hobo,” It was first recorded and popularized by Burnett and Rutherford in 1926. Tommy said he learned it from fiddler Pate Martin (1897-1963), a contemporary who lived in Surry County.
2. Old Buck (key of G, tuned GDAE). Tommy said, “I was trying to learn ‘Paddy on the Turnpike’ and that’s what I come up with. Rafe Brady [1913-1987, a noted fiddler from Carroll County, Va.] was down here, and I got him to play ‘Paddy on the Turnpike’ for me, oh, two or three times. That’s back when he was making music with my brothers Early and Oscar, along about nineteen and forty-two. Well, he come back in about six months, and I was playing that there. He says ‘Tommy, that ain’t “Paddy on the Turnpike,” that’s “Old Buck.”’ Now whether they’s a tune named ‘Old Buck’ or not, I don’t know, but that’s what he said. I don’t know if he was just carrying on or not, but that’s what I’ve always called it ever since.”
3. Susananna Gal (key of D, tuned ADAE). Also known as “Western Country,” this is a common tune in southwest Virginia and northwest North Carolina. Tommy used to sing a verse of his own creation about horses named Logan and Morgan, a humorous reference to two uncles of his wife, Logan and Morgan Lowe. Tommy played a lot of music with Logan Lowe (1867-1944), a fiddler known for his sense of humor, who doubtless enjoyed the joke.
4. Old Jimmy Sutton (key of D, tuned ADAE). This is a common tune in the area and all the old-timers seem to have played it. Tommy loved to ham it up, with his body swaying, arms flapping, both feet keeping time, bleating like a lamb in distress.
5. Old Jimmy Sutton, take 2.
6. Peekaboo Waltz (key of D, tuned ADAE). This tune was often played at local school breakings. These celebrations, on the last day of the school year, were important events in mountain communities, with much ceremony and festivities, including food, games, student speeches, and music. The children would line up and march, led by prominent citizens and musicians. Tommy described breakings at Round Peak’s Ivy Green School, where two lines of children were led by Tommy’s grandfather Rufus Jarrell and “old man” Pet McKinney (probably by virtue of their status as Civil War veterans), with music provided by fiddlers Ben Jarrell and Tony Lowe (1883-1913). This ancient and widespread tune was a popular marching number at such events. Also known as “Green Gravel,” “Jackson’s March,” “Chapel Hill Serenade,” and “Green Willis,” among other names, it is linked according to some sources to a traditional English tune called “New Rigged Ship.” It bears no relationship to the “Peekaboo Waltz” commonly played in other parts of the country.
7. Backstep Cindy, the new way (key of D, tuned ADAE). Ben Jarrell and his music partners Charlie Lowe (1878-1964) and Tony Lowe overhauled “old-time Backstep Cindy” and came up with this new way of playing the tune, and Tommy felt it was a big improvement. The tune was called “Backstep” or “Step Back” to distinguish it from the unrelated “Rockingham Cindy” (#8, below).
8. Rockingham Cindy (key of D, tuned ADAE). Often this tune is simply called “Cindy” elsewhere in the mountains and in other parts of the country, but Round Peakers called it “Rockingham Cindy” to distinguish it from the popular local tune “Backstep Cindy” (#7, above). One of the verses Tommy would sing asks, “Where’d you get your whiskey at? Way down in Rockingham.”
9. Breaking Up Christmas (key of A, tuned AEAE). This much-played tune refers to a mountain holiday tradition in which dances were held in different homes in the community over a period of two weeks, beginning the day after Christmas. They would begin in the afternoon, break for supper, and often continue late into the night. Round Peak guitarist and singer Paul Sutphin (1918-2003) said that fiddler Pet McKinney (1846-1926) was the main source for this tune in the Round Peak area. It was played across the Blue Ridge in Virginia, as well. [Maybe we could reference Paul Brown’s documentary project and resulting CD?]
10. When Sorrows Encompass Me Round (key of A, tuned AEAE). This is one of a few Primitive Baptist hymns that Tommy sang and played on fiddle. He didn’t profess to being particularly religious, but his rendition of “When Sorrows Encompass Me Round” could be deeply moving nonetheless. The words are from the Primitive Baptist songbook (the denomination to which he felt the greatest affinity), of which he owned a copy. The songbook does not transcribe the melodies to which the words are traditionally sung, but this is essentially the same as the Sacred Harp hymn “Idumea.”
11. Old Bunch of Keys (key of A, tuned AEAE). “That’s about the best tune to dance them old-timey reels to, like the Half Moon,” Tommy said. “That came from across the mountain.” Tommy learned the tune in the early 1920s when he went with his father-in-law Charlie Barnett Lowe (1872-1924, not to be confused with Charlie Lowe of Round Peak) to Fancy Gap, Virginia. There they visited two fiddlers with whom Charlie often played music, Fred Hawks (1891-1979) and John Rector (1899-1994). Rector in turn said he learned the tune from “old man Marcus Hanks” (1857-1936), who neighbors remembered as much for his explosive temper as for his fiddling.
12. John Brown’s Dream (key of A, tuned AEAE). According to Tommy, Ben Jarrell and Charlie Lowe made this tune by revamping an older one, “Pretty Little Girl.” You can hear Ben play it with DaCosta Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters, who recorded for the Gennett label in 1927. It was one of Tommy’s favorites, and he would spin off seemingly endless rhythmic variations down on the low strings.
13. Sally Ann, the old way (key of D, tuned ADAE). Tommy called this “old-time Sally Ann” to distinguish it from the “new” version (#14, below). He said the older tune came from “up the mountain, in Virginia.” There are actually several subtly different versions of the tune from musicians even within this small area. Here, as he often did when he performed this tune, Tommy imitates his uncle Charlie Jarrell’s distinctive bowing in the last go-round. “He jerked his bow a little different than I do,” Tommy would say.
14. Sally Ann, the new way (key of D, tuned ADAE). Tommy used to say that Ben Jarrell and Tony Lowe jazzed up the old-time “Sally Ann” (#13, above) to make this new one. However, he also once said “I learned that third part from Hiram Moody in Lambsburg [Virginia] and I brought it down to North Carolina and showed everybody else.” Hiram is said to have learned the tune from Tony Lowe, so it would appear that Ben and Tony overhauled the first two parts and Hiram added the third. In any case the new three-part version became so popular that it is sometimes jokingly called the “Round Peak National Anthem.”