The stately, harmonized fiddling of Spencer & Rains fits the quiet cold of snowbound December well, and since I’ll be traveling up to Colorado this one’s a good pick. One of the regulars at our old-time jam threw this one a few months back and I immediately took to it. Haven’t tried it on fiddle until my prep for this TOTW, and am getting to play my new Guarneri that’s got a real sweet sound to it (i.e. any scratches or flubs are all on me).
Setauket’s a nicely structured melody, the B part essentially a mirror of A but up a fourth. You won’t find much background online (make sure to check out the Geoff Seitz video below), but it’s one of the tunes collected by William Sidney Mount, famous for his portraits of banjo and fiddle players (which should be very familiar to BHO users, the paintings even showing up as avatars now and again). Setauket is attributed to a fiddler named Anthony “Black Tony” Clapp, who named the piece after his Long Island hometown (to this day you can visit his gravesite there).
Here’s my crack at it, cross-tuned in ADAE.
Would love y’all’s banjo arrangements of the tune.
Awesome links:
Listen to Tricia Spencer play the tune
Hear a brief sample from Tricia’s Fiddlin’ Like There’s No Tomorrow
Fellow fan’s blog post about searching for the origins of the tune (includes a couple more renditions).
The aforementioned video taken at Seitz’s shop, with some excellent playing, a more hot take on the tune.
