For this weeks TOTW I'm choosing Little Dutch Girl, one of my favorite A-tunes. I learned this tune only 5 or 6 years ago from my fiddling friend Steve, and I'm not sure where he got it from.
The Fiddlers Companion states that there are two Ozark tunes by this name, both collected (perhaps) from the same family. Marion Thede has one in her fiddle book, from Willie Collins, but also includes the melody that I'm doing here in her book under the title Liza Jane No. 3. However, the FC goes on to say that both Earl Collins (Willie's son) and Bob Holt remember hearing this melody under the title Little Dutch Girl Douglas County, Mo., when they were young.
Earl Collins recorded his version on a 1975 LP, and this is probably the source of all the other versions. Collins was the topic of a 1970 documentary called Say Old Man Can You Play the Fiddle, by Bess Lomax Hawes. This documentary has been released as a dvd called The Films of Bess Lomax Hawes, and you can read more about this at http://www.media-generation.net/DVD%20PAGES/Bess/Bess.htm, and you can also view a clip of Earl playing Black Mountain Rag. Also you can download the liner notes as a pdf toward the bottom of that page. The notes include an article about Colliins which originally appeared in the program book of the 1975 Smithsonian Institution Festival of American Folklife. Here is the Collins biography from that article, which then goes on to include several pages of interview. It makes good reading.
Earl Collins was born in Douglass County, Missouri in 1911. In 1917 his family
moved to Oklahoma, where they sharecropped and Earl augmented their income by
playing fiddle at square dances through the bitter early years of the depression. He
married 1931 and he and his wife moved to Los Angeles, California in 1935 where Earl
turned his hand to any lob he could get: hod carrier, truck driver, trash hauler, machinist,
welder mechanic. He retired in 1969 because of his always fragile health. For years he
tried to convert his skill as a fiddler into a money-making occupation. He never made it,
and in 1949, he put his fiddle away and did not play again until 1965, when his sons
persuaded him to take it up again. Earl’s extraordinary technique and musicianship
made him a star on the old time fiddlers circuit in California, almost every weekend until
his death in 1975 he played at one or another local contest or jam session. In the
following, Earl tells his story in his own words, which have been excerpted from a series
of taped interviews conducted by Barbara LaPan Rahm.
OK, a few versions that I found. I'm sure there are many more.
- Chris Carney teaches a version on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNpbmMU4-lg
- Earl Collins, probably the definitive recording, from the Slippery-Hill page of tunes from the Milliner-Koken Collection: http://slippery-hill.com/M-K/AEAE/LittleDutchGirl.mp3. This is from Collins' 1975 LP That's Earl.
- JanetB has a great version here on the hangout. She also has more information on Earl Collins.
- Ron Novit has a full band version on the hangout, I think with 3-finger banjo behind the fiddle?
- On my personal site I have a banjo version from 2007, soon after I had learned the tune. Also there is a 2010 fiddle version, again fairly soon after I had decided to try it on fiddle. And then I'm also attaching a video banjo version which I did last night.
- Drew Beisswenger & Gordon McCann have the musical notation for Little Dutch Girl in the Mel Bay book Ozarks Fiddle Music, which is a nice resource.
Erich
