"Don't want to start a fight about whether this is the Real "Way of the World," (mine is from Luther Strong) so maybe we should be neutral and differentiate them by their sources: Stepp's "Ways..." and Strong's "Ways...". But they Are entirely different tunes and we should not perpetuate any confusion. Maybe Next week's tune could be Luther's." (emphasis added)
- Post by Curt Bourtese, from ARCHIVED TOPIC: TOTW 6/25/2010 - Ways of the World
Better late than never. The Tune of the Week for February 27, 2015 is Ways of the World, as played by Perry County, Kentucky fiddler Luther Strong (1892-1963), who was recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax and his wife Elizabeth in a hotel room in Hazard, Kentucky on October 18, 1937. Strong's Ways of the World, as Curt Bourtise pointed out in 2010, is an entirely different tune than the one with the same name played by William H. Stepp, recorded by the Lomaxes in Salyersville, Kentucky, eight days later. The Stepp tune is in A Mixolydian, with the fiddle cross tuned in A (AEae), while Strong's tune is in D major, in a variant of standard tuning, but with the 4th string dropped from G down to D, an octave below the 3rd string (DDae). This is a rare tuning; the Milliner-Koken Collection of Old Time Fiddle Tunes lists only two among it's more than 1,400 transcriptions, the other being J.P. Fraley's Cluckin' Hen. It is also a variant of another open D fiddle tuning, DDad, more common but still very unusual. Listen to Luther Strong's field recording by clicking on the link below, and you will hear his very liberal use of both the 3rd and 4th strings as a low drone, the 3rd when he is playing certain melody notes on the second string, and the 4th when he is hitting the open 3rd as a melody note. I have included a link to my own transcription of Strong's playing, based on his first time through. As he repeats, he generally substitutes another phrase at the beginning of the B part, borrowed from later in the strain, and that is how most old-time musicians play the B part today. Note that Strong varies the structure, sometimes playing each part once (AB), and sometimes repeating the low part (AAB). Most musicians today use the standard fiddle tune structure of AABB. Ways of the World was already a well known Kentucky mountain fiddle standard when he played it for the Lomaxes; it was not an uncommon contest tune around the region.
Ways of the World, played by Luther Strong
Transcription of Strong's Ways of the World
Luther Strong in Austin, Indiana, ca. 1955
Alan Lomax, the legendary folklorist, was only 22 when he recorded Luther Strong. He had just graduated the year before from the University of Texas, with a BA in philosophy. In February, 1937, he married a fellow UT student, Elizabeth Harold Goodman, in the same month that he was hired by the Library of Congress (LOC) to manage their Archive of Folksong. He was no stranger to field collecting; in 1933, then 18, he had accompanied and assisted his father, the legendary folklorist John Lomax, on a collecting trip for the LOC through Texas and Louisiana, recording a great many rural singers and musicians, including Huddie Ledbetter, the great "Leadbelly." On this Kentucky trip, Alan and Elizabeth would spend about two months in the eastern part of the state, recording dozens of traditional musicians, including eleven fiddlers, starting with Jim Howard, in Harlan, Kentucky. Luther Strong was the second to last, just before Bill Stepp, who was recorded down the road in Salyersville. The story of the Luther Strong recording session is described in great detail in Stepthen Wade's wonderful book The Beautiful Musical All Around Us, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2012. Lomax had apparently heard about Strong from other musicians the couple had already recorded earlier in the trip. Wade speculates that Lomax may have been especially motivated by banjoist Justus Begley, who he had recorded in Hazard on October 17th. Begley played regularly with Strong, and besides, he was running for sheriff at the time and looking to do favors for anyone who might vote. When Lomax showed up at Strong's door in Buckhorn, Kentucky the following day, Strong's young daughter was reluctant to tell him the whereabouts of her father, given the large number of revenue officers and bill collectors who often came to the door. After some prompting, she finally confessed that her father was in jail down in Hazard, arrested the night before for public drunkenness. Lomax made the 30 mile trip back to Hazard and bailed Strong out of jail, picking up a pint of whiskey at the same time, because, Strong reportedly said, "the only way I can record any tunes is I'm gonna have to have a drink."
Strong would record a total of 29 tunes for the Lomaxes that day, including The Hog-Eyed Man, Sally Goodin, Last of Callhan, Lost Girl, Give the Fiddler a Dram, The Old Hen Cackled, and Glory in the Meeting House. Luther Strong was 45 years old and in his prime as a fiddler, even if his personal life was dissolute. Bruce Greene, in a Fiddler's Magazine article from June, 1997, sites another source as saying that Strong had to borrow a fiddle, because he did not own one himself at the time. Perhaps it came from his mentor, fiddler Bev Baker, who also recorded six tunes in that October 18th session. However, it was apparent to all, including Baker, that the student had long since surpassed the teacher. Writing to Strong the following year, Lomax tells him, "I still can say with assurance that I like your fiddling better than anyone I have heard."
Alan Lomax, as a young folk music collector, and in 1986
When Alan and Elizabeth Lomax made their trip through Eastern Kentucky in 1937, they had to bring their recording studio with them. On his earlier collecting trips with his father, they had used an Edison cylinder recording machine, but the LOC had supplied Lomax with a state of the art Presto disk recorder, which used 10 inch aluminum disks coated with a lacquer finish that would take the incision. According to another source, the PBS documentary Lomax the Songhunter, he also had to bring along a transformer to attach to his car battery, and an amplifier- in case he needed to record where there was no electricity- along with microphones, spare disks, and other paraphenalia. All of this apparently required removing the rear seat of his car, in order to have sufficient room for all of the gear. One must presume, thankfully, that there was electricity in the hotel in Hazard. When recording, Lomax had to brush away the spirals of aluminum and lacquer as they were cut by the needle. According to a website called The 78 Project, his Presto recording machine "did not always operate at the correct speed and the original Circle records, which were first issued beginning in the fall of 1947, in limited edition albums of 45 twelve-inch records, need to be played back at around 85 r.p.m to enable them to be pitch corrected. " This may explain why the pitch is significantly off of standard on the Strong recording.
The Presto Disc Recording Machine
Most old-time musicians I know (including my clawhammer picking pal Ed Britt) first learned Ways of the World not from the Luther Strong Library of Congress recording, but from a recording made in 1972 by The Highwoods String Band, released by Rounder Records on an album called Fire on the Mountain. This young, energetic band from Syracuse, New York included Doug Dorschug on guitar, Mac Benford on banjo, Bob Potts an Walt Koken on fiddles, and Jenny Cleland on bass. They played with an enthusiasm and showmanship that was deliberately designed to bring to mind the Skillet Lickers, and their album was enormously influential in setting the direction of the old time music revival. The abum is still available on CD. You can hear their Ways of the World by clicking the link below.
Ways of the World, played by the Highwoods String Band
There are three wonderful recordings of Ways of the World posted here on the Banjo Hangout, all different. I encourage you to give them a listen, and leave a nice word or two:
Ways of the World, played by Malcolm Smith (Malcolm), Duham, North Carolina, uploaded 4/9/2010
Ways of the World, played by Lyle Konigsberg (Lyle K), Champaign, Illinois, uploaded 6/28/2010
Ways of the World, played by Dave Linder (dandclinder), Charleston, South Carolina, uploaded 11/1/2013
The only video is by the incomparable fellow Bostonian Tim Rowell (clawhammertim):
When Alan Lomax completed his two month trip through Eastern Kentucky, he was still three years away from perhaps his single most significant single achievement- his March, 1940 interview and recording of then 27 year old folksinger Woody Guthrie, sessions which introduced the young performer to the music world. (I learned the Lost Train Blues on the harmonica from that recording, back around 1967.) By the end of 1942, Lomax had left his Library of Congress job, after a highly vexed Congress had unceremoniously eliminated the budget of the Archive of Folksong. He and Elizabeth would divorce in 1949. In 1950, Lomax would find himself on the blacklist, and in September of that year he would move to Europe, to pursue the life of an expatriot, recording musicians in the Alps instead of the Appalachians. He did not return to the states until 1959. He passed away in 2002, at the age of 87.
A few years after the Lomax recording session, the Strong family would leave their Buckhorn home, moving on to a series of other homes in Eastern Kentucky and Ohio, following Luther Strong's wanderlust and need for employment, before finally settling in the town of Austin, in Southern Indiana. Strong would pass away there in 1963, at the age of 71. In Greene's 1997 article, he describes an interview he had with Donald Goodman, of Booneville Kentucky, who had known the Strong family quite well. Greene relates:
He (Goodman) said Strong had an extra long bow “and used every bit of it.” Rumor had it that he put pennies under the feet of his bridge to get a keener sound, but Donald said he was there when Strong began that practice. He said they were at some local fiddlers’ contest, and Strong said he couldn’t compete because the bridge was too low on his fiddle and the strings rubbed on the fingerboard. So Donald suggested placing pennies under the bridge to raise it up. It worked well, Strong went on to play “Sally Goodin’” and win the contest, and he liked the pennies so much, that he just kept them there, saying, “It’s just like Baby Bear, it’s just right.”
So which is the "real" Ways of the World, the tune in the Stepp recording, or the tune in the Strong recording? According to Bruce Greene, he was told by several local fiddlers around Eastern Kentucky that the Stepp tune was misnamed, that it's real name was "Who's Been Here Since I've Been Gone." So I assume that settles it.
I have attached a version of Ways of the World of my own making, recorded at the Appalachian String Band Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia, back in August, 2012. The fiddler is my good friend and fellow BHO member Don Couchie. I have a tab of my three-finger version posted on my website. I am looking forward to hearing a lot of new versions from my fellow BHO members, those with time on their hands and an itch in their fingers.
Don Couchie
Before I end, I have one more story to tell. A few years ago, I came down with a terrible case of pneumonia that put me in the hospital for nearly a week. Before I was admitted, my temperature had climbed to over 105 degrees. As soon as I was admitted to the hospital, the doctors put me on a massive dose of antibiotics and what not, which brought the fever down, but for days it would still move up and down until they got it under complete control. Anyway, oddly, whenever my fever would cross 102.5- exaclty 102.5- I would start getting delirious, exclusively manifested by a non-stop banjo playing in my head. I had no control over what tune was played, or how long it was played, or at what speed, but I remember that the tune that got played the most in my head was Luther Strong's Ways of the World. When the fever would drop below 102.5, the playing would instantly go away. One day a young physicians assistant came in to take my temperature, I told him, don't bother, it's 102.5. He said, oh, did you take it already? No, I told him, but I just started hearing banjo picking. And I was right.
