Fiddlin' Around

Johnny Gimble in Nashville, 1975

Fiddlin’ Around is a Western Swing (or Texas Swing) tune written by one of the greatest purveyors of the style, Johnny Gimble. Western Swing was developed in the 1920s as an amalgamation of old-time fiddling, ragtime, jazz, and Ranchero music, and Fiddlin’ Around is one of the classics in the repertoire.

Johnny Gimble was born on May 30, 1926 in Tyler, Texas. He started playing the fiddle at age 10, and he was influenced by fiddlers Cliff Bruner and Cecil Brower as well as the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. He also studied the playing of Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen, who frequently performed and recorded with jazz legend Benny Goodman. It did not take long for Johnny to master the fiddle, and he joined the Texas Playboys in 1949 at the ripe age of 23.

Johnny wrote Fiddlin’ Around in 1961. As the story goes, he was driving his ’61 Rambler Classic from Waco, Texas to Springfield, Missouri one day to perform at the Ozark Jubilee, when a melodic idea popped into his head. He started steering the car with his knee so he could flesh out the idea on his fiddle right then and there, and Fiddlin’ Around was born. It was first released 12 years later as the title cut on an album he recorded for Capitol in 1973, and it was later featured on Chet Atkins’ album Superpickers (1974) as well as on the soundtrack for the movie Honeysuckle Rose (1980). Johnny was the most in-demand session fiddler in Nashville in the 1960s, and ‘70s, and Fiddlin’ Around remains his most popular compositional contribution to fiddle music.

Heroes featured Gimble and O'Connor duo

Double-stops and swing rhythm are perhaps the two most notable characteristics of Fiddlin’ Around. It is a challenging tune to play, especially when executing the double-stop passages featuring augmented tonalities and fourth-finger extensions. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the tune to master, however, is the simultaneous playing and “scat” singing. Musical motifs and arpeggio fragments are “scatted,” or sung, using a variety of improvised syllables and vowel sounds. Scat singing is a musical device most commonly employed in jazz, and Johnny used it often, including on the recording of Fiddlin’ Around he and I made together on my album, Heroes (1994). The solos, scatting, and overall interplay between the two instruments from that particular recording heavily influenced the version of the tune in this book.

12th Street Rag

12th Street rag 1915 sheet music

One of the most popular ragtime-era tunes is 12th Street Rag, composed in the late 1800s by Texan pianist and arranger Euday Bowman and his sister, Mary M. Bowman. In 1914, the Jenkins Music Company purchased the rights to 12th Street Rag from the Bowmans for $100 – an amount that would eventually prove to be an incredible bargain. Jenkins hired composer and arranger C.E. Wheeler to simplify Bowman’s version before advertising and selling sheet music for the tune to the general public. Moderately popular for years after its release, 12th Street Rag became a hit in 1927 when jazz pianist and big band leader Bennie Moten recorded it for Victor. It became an even bigger success in the 1940s when trombonist Pee Wee Hunt’s recording of the tune reached number one on the Billboard charts and sold more than 3 million copies. 12th Street Rag thereafter became, and remains to this day, a standard in jazz repertoire. (Euday Bowman eventually regained the copyright to his famous composition, but only after it had reached its commercial zenith.)

Terry Morris 1975 grand Masters

Ragtime music has had a place in American fiddling since as early as the 1830s, when ragtime tunes were called “cakewalks.” After the style achieved international popularity in the 1890s, many old-time fiddlers, in particular, adapted piano rags to fiddle, maintaining some pianistic elements of phrasing and construction. Today, 12th Street Rag nd many other ragtime tunes thrive in the American fiddling scene and are frequently heard at all the major contests and conventions around the country. The great fiddle champion Terry Morris was particularly fond of 12th Street Rag, and his arrangement of the tune has become well-known and commonly copied.

Amazing Grace

John Newton

Amazing Grace is perhaps the most well known hymn in the world. Its history is adventurous and special, in large part because it is so deeply imbued with the evolution and culture of this country. I believe it has one of the most fascinating backgrounds of any piece of music in this entire Method.

The story begins in 1725, when couple John and Elizabeth Newton gave birth to a little boy, whom they also named John, in London, England. When the young Newton was only six years old, his mother died of tuber- culosis, and without anyone else to care for him, he embarked on a number of sea voyages with his father, who was the commander of a merchant ship in the Mediterranean Sea. A year after his father’s retirement in 1742, Newton was conscripted by the Royal Navy. In the ensuing turbulent few years, he deserted a ship, was recaptured and received a public flogging, got demoted from midshipman to common seaman, was abused by a slave trader and his wife in West Africa, and was eventually rescued by a friend of his father.

On May 10, 1748, Newton encountered a violent storm while commandeering his own slave ship back to England. Convinced the storm would sink the ship, Newton, who had no religious convictions, wrote “Lord, have mercy upon us” in his journal and asked God for safety and protection. He also wrote, “Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; ‘tis grace has bro’t me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home” – lines that would eventually end up in the hymn Amazing Grace. Newton’s encounter with the storm sparked a spiritual conversion that would change the course of his life.

Circular Church Ruin

For the next several years however, Newton operated his own ship in a booming industry – the slave trade, which brought him fre- quently to the American coast, in particular the port city of Charleston, South Carolina. While visiting Charleston in 1749, Newton attended a worship service at the Circular Congregational Church (still in operation today), the irony of which cannot be emphasized enough: there, on American soil, stood John Newton singing the praises of God, while several blocks away the slaves he transported on his ship were being sold to their new owners.

In the 1750s, Newton got married, underwent a serious illness, retired from seafaring, and became increasingly devoted to God. He became a disciple of George Whitfield, a deacon in the Church of England, and he taught himself Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Eventually, he was ordained by the Bishop of Lincoln and accepted the curacy of Olney, Buckinghamshire, where his church services became so popular that the church building itself had to be enlarged. As his renown grew, he began traveling and preaching throughout England.

In the late 1760s, he befriended poet William Cowper in Olney, and the two began holding weekly prayer meetings during which they would write hymns. In 1779, after a decade’s worth of these meetings, they published Olney Hymns, which contained 68 pieces by Cowper and 280 by Newton. Several of Newton’s hymns are still fairly popu- lar today, including How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds and Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken. Another hymn, Faith’s Review and Expectation, contained the text that would soon evolve into Amazing Grace.

Once an active participant in the slave trade, Newton publicly decried it in a pamphlet, Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, which was pub- lished in 1788. Especially given his spiritual convictions, he was humiliated by his involvement in the industry, and he became an ally of abolitionist and member of Parliament William Wilberforce. Newton lived to see Wilberforce convince the British government to pass the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which abolished the slave trade in the British Empire. Newton died later that year.

William Walker

Although the slave trade continued in America for decades after Newton’s death, the Circular Church in Charleston continued to thrive and build a congregation of both blacks and whites. Notably, the first Sunday School for religious education in South Carolina began there in 1816. Perhaps more important, it was one of the first places a young man named William Walker heard the hymn, Faith’s Review and Expectation, in the early 19th century.

Walker (1809-1875), an American Baptist song leader, published a shape note tunebook entitled The Southern Harmony first in 1835 and several more times, with revisions, over the next few decades. The book contained 335 sacred songs, many of which were new pairings of secular American folksongs with existing hymn texts that were intended to be sung in churches and schools throughout the Southeast. The shape note system employed by Walker in The Southern Harmony, which featured four shapes indi- cating different scale degrees and syllables, was designed as a music teaching device as well as a tool for facilitating congregational singing. (Years later, Walker and others re-published many of the hymns using shape note systems with even more shapes.)

One of the hymns in the 1847 edition of The Southern Harmony is the version of Amazing Grace that is so widely known and beloved today. The text – drawn from Faith’s Review and Expectation – is combined with an entirely different melody from the one Newton used. In fact, in the first part of the 19th century, more than 20 musical settings of the same words written by Newton were circu- lated with varying degrees of popularity. But it was Walker’s pairing of the text with a melody known as New Britain that eventually came out on top. New Britain – an amalgam of two folk melodies, St. Mary and Gallaher, which are believed to have originated in Scotland around 500 years ago – was a melody familiar to the American public for decades before it became solidified as Amazing Grace. In its present form, it is one of the most recognizable melodies in the world, and its message is incredibly powerful.

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)

That sav’d a wretch like me!

I once was lost but now am found

Was blind, but now I see.

F. C.'s Jig

Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O'Connor record F.C.'s Jig in 1995

In 1990, I composed my first concerto, The Fiddle Concerto. It was the first of its kind in that it adhered to Western classical concerto form and development yet drew upon American fiddling themes, rhythm, stylistic development, technique, and approaches to sound.

Five years later, Yo-Yo Ma asked me to compose a duet for us to record on our debut album together, Appalachia Waltz. Rather than compose something from scratch, I adapted a movement of The Fiddle Concerto for this purpose. I used material from the third movement, which is in jig time (6/8).

Mark and his wife Maggie film a music video of F.C.'s Jig in 2015

To convert the 14-minute concerto movement into a four-minute string duo, which I decided to call F.C.’s Jig (short for Fiddle Concerto’s jig), I eliminated the middle development section in F# minor and focused on the beginning and ending themes in D major. I retained the (1st) violin line from the score, and I adapted the entire symphonic orchestration into a second line, to be performed by cello or in this case, 2nd violin. The result is an example of American Classical string music filled with energetic rhythm and virtuoso flair!

Take the "A" Train

Joe Venuti

Take the ‘A’ Train, one of the classics of jazz repertoire, was composed by the great African-American pianist, writer, and arranger, Billy Strayhorn. One evening in 1938, Duke Ellington invited Strayhorn to a party at his home in Sugar Hill, Harlem, instructing him to “take the A train” to get there. The phrase stuck with Strayhorn, and he wrote a tune to go with it not long afterward. In 1941, Duke himself recorded the song – which became a hit – and started performing it in all his live concerts. Nearly 80 years later, the A train is still the best way to get to Harlem!

The memorable trumpet solo from Duke’s first recording of Take the ‘A’ Train was performed by bandmate Ray Nance, a respected multi-instrumentalist and arranger who also happened to play the violin. Some years after the recording was released, Nance arranged a slow, somber duet version of the tune for violin and piano, which he performed with pianist Billy Taylor at the memorial services for both Strayhorn (1967) and Duke (1974).

Joe Venuti and Stephane Grappelli

One of my favorite violin interpretations of Take the ‘A’ Train is by Joe Venuti, arguably the first great jazz violinist in history. Venuti was born to Italian parents while on an immigrant ship in transit to the United States in 1903. As a child in Philadelphia, he learned theory and solfeggio from his grandfather and received formal classical training on violin as a member of the James Campbell School Orchestra. At a young age, he took an interest in jazz, blues, and improvisation, which he often played with a friend and fellow violinist in the orchestra.

While still in school, Venuti met the first significant musical partner of his career, jazz guitarist Eddie Lang. The pair started recording together frequently in the 1920s. Venuti became known for his fast, “hot” swing playing, and he was a major inspiration for many of the next generation’s most prominent jazz and swing violinists, including Bob Wills (who went on to form one of the most influential Western Swing bands in history, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys) and Stephane Grappelli. Grappelli and his friend, guitar virtuoso Django Reinhardt, heard Venuti-Lang recordings like Dinah and Tea for Two on the jukeboxes in Paris, which inspired them to start a similar duo in the 1930s.

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn

Venuti went on to perform with Red Nichols and Jean Goldkette as well as on a number of Broadway shows, and his career took a major step forward in 1929 when he joined the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, in which his jazz playing was featured. As part of this ensemble, he appeared on many noteworthy records by Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, The Boswell Sisters, Bing Crosby, and others. Eventually, he became a regular performer on the Bing Crosby Show.

From a young age, Venuti developed a reputation as a practical joker. Once, he poured flour into the bell of a tuba, and after the tubist played his first note, flour erupted from the bell and wreathed the entire band in a white cloud. On another occasion, he somehow convinced the great jazz cornetist Bix Biederbecke to climb into a tub full of Jell-O. For one particular recording session, he hired several different bassists, all of whom arrived at the studio around the same time only to find the front door locked. They remained out in the sidewalk in the rain, confused as to why so many other bassists were present. (This joke backfired, since Venuti was required to pay each of them a union scale fee for the “session.”)

Practical jokes aside, Venuti remains one of the greatest jazz violinists in history. Some of his classic riffs appear starting at Letter B in this version of Take the ‘A’ Train.

Madame Neruda

This Canadian hornpipe Madame Neruda features ricochet-staccato arpeggio bowing. The bowing occurs in measures 2 and 4 and the entire length of Letter B. This technique requires the “throwing” of the bow on the strings of the violin, bouncing it once on each of the three strings, making up each arpeggio group of notes, both down-bow and up-bow directions. The momentum from the throw of the bow, the pulling and guiding of the bow once it's thrown (first down and then up), should result in the notes sounding equal in volume and note value.

This kind of technical stroke also requires a re-direction of the bow on the highest and lowest pitch of each 3-note arpeggio group of notes. The quality of the re-directed staccato bow stroke should equal the thrown ricochet bow.

Canada's fiddle greats, Donnell Leahy and Natalie MacMaster