Date: 28 Mar 22 - 01:04 PM

Sheet Music - Listen - Bill Monroe recording

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I had never really known this song before til recently, when I bought a Bill Monroe compilation cassette (Country Music Hall Of Fame Series, MCA) which had the song. The album featured some fairly comprehensive liner notes, but the entry on the song was brief:

During the 1960s, however, folk music enthusiasts generally regarded bluegrass as an antidote to rock & roll and began to champion Monroe as a defender of America's folk music heritage. His repertoire already brimmed with folksongs and fiddle tunes, and partly in response to his new-found audience he recorded numbers like the traditional Midnight on the Stormy Deep. Joining him on this performance are singer-guitarist Peter Rowan, banjoist Lamar Grier, and fiddler Richard Greene, three of several young urban musicians Monroe brought into his band in the 1960s. Monroe's duet with Rowan, marked by Bill's carefully controlled falsetto, is especially stirring. An album devoted to his Uncle Pen included The Lee Weddin' Tune, one of many traditional songs Bill absorbed growing up. Kenny Baker, whose many years as a fiddler with the Bluegrass Boys helped to define Monroe's sound, does the honors on this performance. Songs like these made Monroe the centerpiece of numerous folk music festivals and, beginning in 1965, annual festivals devoted exclusively to bluegrass.

So Monroe learned it from "Uncle Pen" Vandiver, some time between the 1920s and 1932.

The song was first recorded and released in 1972 on Bill Monroe's Uncle Pen. As far as I know, that was the only time he recorded the song in studio, and that recording has only been released a handful of times: the original 1972 release, the 1991 compilation album I have, a Bear Family compilation, and a 1999 fiddle compilation album.

A few notes on the name: the original 1972 release gave it as The Lee Weddin Tune, with no apostrophe for the cropped g. Most subsequent releases (including the linked Discogs page of the original release, errantly), however, format the name as The Lee Weddin' Tune, and most subsequent releases do as well.

Part of this comes to the relatively unknown origins of the song. According to bluegrass historian Richard D. Smith (citing an interview between Monroe and Ralph Rinzler*) in Can't You Hear Me Callin', p. 319), "The 'Lee Weddin Tune' was, as Bill understood it, not named after a marriage ceremony but a Kentucky fiddler named Lee Weddin." Hence the lack of apostrophe.

So case closed, right?

Well, not so much. I haven't been able to find so much as a mention elsewhere on a Kentucky fiddler named Lee Weddin, or any spellings derived from that. The closest I've come is George Lee Hawkins (who has some unidentified fiddle tunes that could be worth listening to at a later time [see Kentucky Fiddlers Home Recordings Vol. 1]) -- admittedly, not terribly close. While the case could be that the fiddler was just very obscure and never reached any level of prominence, I have my doubts about that being the case.

The other prevailing theory behind the song's name comes from Tom Ewing's Bill Monroe: The Life and Music of the Blue Grass Man: "According to Monroe-family lore, ... [the song was] possibly connected in some way to the marriage of sixty-eight-year-old Alfred T. Lee and the much younger divorcee Minnie Renfrow Wedding, in Hartford, Kentucky, in November 1919. Mrs. Lee filed for divorce six months later."

Unfortunately, this one isn't verifiable, either, as Kentucky's Ohio County Marriage registry seems to be primarily an in-person thing. The book includes a footnote, but the limited Google Books view I got doesn't allow me to see what it is.

One last thing worth noting on: the original 1972 release credited the song as being written by Bill Monroe, while my 1991 release says the song was arranged by Monroe. Not clear exactly how the distinction changed, unless the original album was just being a bit lazy in their citation.

So, not a lot of hard facts out there about this song, which is a shame, because it's a neat fiddle tune I'd never heard before.

* Smith cited FP-1993-CT-0262, which doesn't seem to exist. He probably meant FP-2006-CT-0262, "Rinzler Fieldwork: Bill Monroe interview (1971)".