Today in History – April 28

James Henry Neel Reed, known as Henry Reed, was born on April 28, 1884, in the Appalachian Mountains of Monroe County, West Virginia. Reed was a master fiddler, banjoist, and harmonica player whose amazing repertoire consisted of hundreds of tunes, as well as multiple performance styles. His music conveyed tradition while setting new directions, and became a touchstone for academic research into the history of U.S. fiddle music.

Henry Reed was the narrow neck in the hourglass of tradition,
through which tunes were guided
back out into the wider currents of circulation.

Alan Jabbour

Josh and Henry Reed, ca. 1903. Henry Reed, age 19, plays banjo and his older brother Josh plays fiddle. Photograph from the collection of James Reed, reproduced with permission. Carl Fleischhauer, photographer, 1975. Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection. American Folklife Center

Henry Reed learned the overwhelming majority of his tunes by ear and retained them by memory. He learned from elderly musicians such as Quince Dillion, who was born around 1810 and served as a fifer in the Mexican War and the Civil War. As a youngster, Reed learned to read music, played alto horn in a local band, and picked up a few additional tunes from sheet music. Though he never played professionally, he played occasionally for local dances and in countless home music sessions. Musical talent ran in his family; several of Reed’s children accompanied him.

Henry Reed playing the fiddle, accompanied by Bobbie Thompson of the Hollow Rock String Band on guitar, at the Narrows (Virginia) Fiddlers Contest… Katherine B. Olson, photographer; Summer 1967. Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection. American Folklife Center

Reed’s musical influence broadened significantly after 1966 when Karen and Alan Jabbour, graduate students at Duke University, began to audio tape his fiddling. Although he originally recorded Henry Reed for academic purposes, Alan Jabbour, an accomplished fiddler himself, also introduced members of the Hollow Rock String Band to the tapes. Tunes such as “Over the Waterfall,” “Kitchen Girl,” and “George Booker” soon became core elements of the band’s repertoire, and Reed’s name was credited. Since the band was at the epicenter of an old-time instrumental music revival that emerged in the Durham/Chapel Hill, North Carolina area in the late 1960s, Reed’s music was passed from musician to musician through Jabbour’s audiotapes as well as at fiddlers’ conventions, festivals, and jam sessions. At the age of eighty-three, Reed began to enjoy wider recognition for a lifetime’s labor of love.

The titles of Henry Reed’s fiddle tunes are redolent of the old Appalachian frontier. Tunes such as “Cabin Creek” and “Shooting Creek” commemorate the arterial network of Appalachian rivers and creeks. “Forked Deer,” “Ducks in the Pond,” and “Hell Among the Yearlings” evoke the woods and countryside. “Santa Ana’s Retreat” and “British Field March” conjure up episodes in American military history.

Henry Reed playing the fiddle in his living room, Glen Lyn, Virginia, ca. 1967. Karen Singer Jabbour, photographer. Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection. American Folklife Center

The many recordings of Henry Reed along with Alan Jabbour’s transcriptions exemplify a complex syncopated bowing style used by fiddlers from Virginia to Texas. This style of fiddling, an important feature of American musical culture in the twentieth century, appears to have evolved in the Upper South and spread with westward migration.  The style’s syncopated patterns reveal an African-American influence that first appeared during the early 1800s, when perhaps half the fiddlers in the Upper South were African American. Syncopated patterns have influenced the shape of American music ever since—from the minstrel stage of the 1840s through ragtime, blues, jazz, country music, and rock-and-roll. “Georgia Camp Meeting,” for example, was intended originally for the “cake walk,” a popular dance of the ragtime era.

The melodic style of many of Reed’s tunes such as “Shady Grove,” “Cluck Old Hen,” or “Betty Likens” also suggests the influence of Native American music from the Eastern Woodlands and Plains. In contrast to the typical European tonal pattern, these tunes begin in a high pitch and cascade downward.

Henry Reed’s music descends directly from the early fiddlers of the Upper South, both black and white, who achieved a dramatic cultural synthesis of European, African and, possibly, Native American musical forms and patterns. Together these musicians helped to create and shape the character of what some claim is America’s greatest cultural contribution to the world: American music. Fiddler Henry Reed, who died on February 8, 1968, embodied that music’s varied vitality and ensured its continuance.

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