Category: Fiddle

Music in Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History

9/26/2022

The sheet music cover for A.P. Heinrich's The Log House, with a Black man holding a gourd banjo or fiddle peaking out from the house as Heinrich plays violin, 1826. Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection/ Johns Hopkins University Libraries.

Unfortunately, all of the music illustrations got cut from Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History. Here are some of the songs referenced, musical examples of early American music, and other musical transcriptions I've come across recently.

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William Adams and the Sounds of KenGar

6/16/2020

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“‘Getting Up Cows,’ that’s what it’s called, ‘Getting Up Cows,” William Adams said. “An old fella played that. He was a cracker-jack old fiddler, though, I don’t believe he could beat me….”
Mike Seeger hadn’t come to the neighborhood to record Adams initially, but now he wanted to hear any tune the Black fiddler could remember, even if he forgot it halfway through or couldn’t remember the name.
“I forget how that goes, though, I haven’t played that since a long time ago,” the 72 year-old Adams continued before he put the bow on the fiddle’s strings and hesitantly pulled the tune from deep in his memory. In the end, it sounded like he might have just last played it a week or a year ago, not some 20-odd years earlier.

The 19 year-old white Seeger listened intently as a brown strip spun from one reel of his Magencord recorder to the other, putting Adams’s notes indelibly down on tape. This was the first time he’d gone into the field to record a musician, but it wouldn’t be his last. This was probably the first and definitely the last time Adams’s fiddling was recorded.

This field recording wasn’t taken in some rural hamlet or deep holler, it was less than five miles from Seeger’s home in the well-to-do suburb of Chevy Chase outside Washington, D.C. And yet in 1953, when Seeger stepped into Adams’s neighborhood of KenGar, segregation left this community so separate from the white towns and neighborhoods surrounding it, a white person might drive by without even knowing it was there.

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BCG Throwback

10/14/2015

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In honor of the Banjo Collector's Gathering (aka 19th Century Banjo Gathering aka Banjo Geekathon) coming to Baltimore in two weeks and my recent article about the BCG in the Old Time Herald, I thought I'd post some of the pictures from last year.

These instruments are all in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

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Violin Maker and Inventor August Heck

9/8/2014

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A friend and luthier, Andy FitzGibbon sent me these images of a fiddle made in Baltimore by a man name August Heck. Baltimore once had a vibrant instrument making scene, and I wondered if Heck was part of that.

Heck was born in Germany in 1847 and emigrated to the United States in 1884, during the second large wave of German immigration. The first large flow came in the 1850s, after the 1848 revolution forced many liberals out of the country. In the 1880s, more than one million Germans resettled in the United States, many escaping religious prosecution and military service. Baltimore had a large German population from every wave of immigration, and German instrument makers like William E. Boucher, Jr. and C.H. Eisenbrant had very successful businesses.

We can track Heck a bit by the locations on his labels. Violins #74 and #77 turned up with "Heckville, Indiana," while an advertisement listed him later in Valparaiso, Indiana. By 1891, he was in Baltimore and by 1900, he's listed in the Washington, D.C. census as an instrument maker. While in Baltimore, he even filed a patent.

"A chin rest for violins" is patented by August Heck, of Baltimore, which is the combination with a clamp having lips for embracing the violin, of a clamping twin button whose plant of motion is at a right angle with lips.
- The Sun, September 30, 1891

The language from the newspaper isn't too clear. Basically, his invention featured a round gear that screwed to tighten a chin rest on the top and bottom of the fiddle. Most chin rests need a little key to tighten two rods that connects the top (the chin rest) with another metal piece on the bottom of the fiddle.

Industrialization meant innovation and everyone wanting to patent their million dollar idea. Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Nikola Tesla did have lots of good ideas that they patented, and they were rewarded for it. Thousands of others followed their lead. In the 1880s, the boom really took off when inventors no longer had to create a model of their patent. All they had to do was have an idea, a description of how it worked, and a drawing. By the end of the century, 700 to 800 patents were being filed each week. Since Heck only needed the idea and a drawing, there is no guarantee that any of these chin rests were actually ever made.

Heck moved around quite a bit. He had lived in at least three states after having only been in the United States for 16 years, and seemed to be constantly chasing his fortune. From Washington, D.C., he may have moved to Los Angeles where he's listed in the 1920 census as a 73 year old man, but still an instrument maker.