Well it looks like this week's volunteer is busy doing some early Christmas shopping or something, so I will post another emergency back-up tune. Sorry about doing two tunes in three weeks, but it was a little too last notice to find another volunteer.
We got our first snow flurry of the winter here in central Ohio today, while I was out putting up Christmas lights. As I did so the neighborhood deer herd wandered through my yard, barely paying any attention to me, as is usually the case. An hour or two later, while searching through various tune lists to find an appropriate Tune of the Week, I came across one entitled Snow Deer. So here it is.
The fiddle tune began life as a song which actually has nothing to do with deer or snow, at least not directly. Instead it tells of a cowboy's forbidden love for an Indian maiden named Snow Deer.
Tull Glazener posted a concise history of the song's origins on the Everything Dulcimer website:
Percy Wenrich, aka "The Joplin Kid", was a prolific song writer in the Tin Pan Alley era of American popular music. Born in Joplin Missouri in 1887, he learned to play piano at an early age, primarily mimicking the ragtime style prevalent at the time. He started writing his own melodies by the age of 15, many of which were used for local advertisements and political campaigns. Encouraged by this early success, he eventually enrolled in the Chicago Musical College for formal training. He earned money while in school working for a number of Chicago based music publishers, creating melodies to match the lyrics sent in by aspiring song writers. He also worked as a "song plugger" in a Milwaukee department store. Soon after graduation, he moved to New York City and Tin Pan Alley, which had become the center of the music publishing business in the United States. There he met and married a vaudeville performer named Dolly Connolley, and started writing songs for some of the productions she was involved in, including such hits as "Red Rose Rag", "Rainbow", "Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet", "When You Wore A Tulip", and perhaps his greatest hit, "On Moonlight Bay".
Tin Pan Alley era music was a "copy cat" industry, and once a song became popular, many other publishers would try and capitalize by trying to emulate it. In 1907, the song "Red Wing" was such a huge hit that it spun off a number of other songs about Western themes in general, and "Indian maidens" in particular. Wenrich teamed up with Edward Madden in 1910 for the similarly themed "Silver Bell", the success of which encouraged him to go back that theme again in 1913, when he wrote, with Jack Mahoney, another Indian maid song named "Snow Deer". His wife introduced it in one of her vaudeville shows, and it quickly became another hit, selling nearly 2 million copies of sheet music within just a few years. It remained popular in shows and eventually on the radio for the next 30 years.
The two most famous vocal versions are by Woody Guthrie and Bob Wills.
Woody Guthrie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0JlXpiST40
Bob Wills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_inxrR4scw
The song seemed to be especially popular in the Western Swing genre. In 1940 The Light Crust Doughboys (who claim to be the "longest running band in the history of recorded music") released an instrumental version of Snow Deer on Okeh Records as the B side to If You'll Come Back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-mYtgD3w9s
A popular and well-known song and melody throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s, Snow Deer at some point entered the bluegrass and old-time repertoire.
The Stanley Brothers included an instrumental version on their 1963 album "Five-String Hootenanny" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWA5So3Y1m8) and in the years since many bluegrass banjoists have recorded the tune, including Don Reno, Bill Emerson, and Tom Adams.
Legendary Canadian folk musician, fiddler, and bandleader Don Messer recorded a "down east" style version with his band the Islanders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bnMgTO9Akc
An internet search will turn up many recent fiddle, banjo, and band versions. Here are a few.
SOLO FIDDLE
Vi Wickam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEN8bWJZ_IU
Susanna Heysteck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjeVNnYk5Rs
SOLO BANJO
Tim Davis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZJ_RMKf6Rc