The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #164723   Message #4047116
Posted By: Lighter
19-Apr-20 - 08:01 PM
Thread Name: Texas Fiddle Tunes, 1900
Subject: RE: Texas Fiddle Tunes, 1900
The Dallas Morning News was unusually interested in old-time fiddling in 1900. Reporting an old fiddlers' contest on April 10, 1900, the News provided a few more titles:

Culpepper
Gilroy [sic]
Black-Eyed Susie
Banko
Rory O'Moore
Melinda
Siege of Knoxville
Flowers of Edinburgh
Kingdom Come
Old George Booker
Old Black Joe
Drunkard's Lament
Home, Sweet Home

In announcing the contest (back on Feb. 25), more titles were given:

St. Patrick's Day in the Morning
Listen to the Mockingbird
Old Gray Horse Come Tearing out of the Wilderness
Sich a Gittin' Upstairs

The competition was sponsored by local members of the United Confederate Veterans, many of whom would have been in their '50s in 1900. To be "old-time," then, many of the tunes must have been played during or before the Civil War. (Newspaper mentions of titles before the post-1890s heyday of the "old fiddlers' contest" are very scarce.)

And on April 22, the News added

Pendleton's Reel

Conspicuously absent from any of these lists are today's favorites "Sourwood Mountain," "Cripple Creek," "Cumberland Gap," and "Old Joe Clark."