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Don Borchelt - Posted - 01/19/2017: 22:19:53
He probably didn't play the his fiddle all that often. It was said that he only knew about thirty or forty tunes on it, in contrast to the hundreds if not thousands of songs he wrote and performed over the span of his life. But when he walked into the studio of Moses Asch, the head of Folkways Records, in April, 1944, Woody Guthrie brought it with him. Over some ten sessions in 1944 and later in 1945, in between his renditions of traditional folk and country songs like Worried Man Blues, The Roving Gambler, and Foggy Mountain Top, and his own topical songs like One Big Union, Union Maid, and the Sinking of the Ruben James, he would occasionally pull out the fiddle, and saw his way through one or another of the old standards, like Sally Goodin, Rye Straw, Cacklin' Hen, and an old Texas tune Woody called the Cowboy's Waltz. Recorded in January, 1945, Woody was accompanied on the waltz by Bess Lomax Hawes on the mandolin, and an unidentified bass player. Hawes was Alan Lomax's sister, who would four years later write the song Charlie on the MTA. In 1977, she became the first director of the Folk and Traditional Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts. But on this day she was Woody's accompaniest, and hoping to become one of the Almanac Singers.
In 1940, when he first came East, Alan Lomax would record several hours of music and conversation with Woody for the Library of Congress. Early in the session, Guthrie describes the square dances he would attend as a teenager in Okemah, Oklahoma.
I was out on a farm there about seventeen miles north of town, and stayed out there for a long time with a family of people, and that's where I first got acquainted with square dances. They always had their fiddle and their old guitar, and everybody from all over the whole countryside'd come, and they called 'em ice-cream freezings, or house parties. They'd all come out there, and usually the boys would come in and tie all their horses up to the hitchin' post outside and come in, and usually before the square dance was complete, why, there'd be anywhere from two gang fights on up, and 'bout fifteen or twenty good, fast singles, just fist fights, you know. Down in that country, they had Prohibition in them days, and so there was lots of moonshine whiskey and there was lots of bootleg liquor stills all over the whole country, and pretty near every family made their own wry whiskey, you know.
This is not your genteel, well-supervised square dance from the eastern Appalachians. You can hear the spry, anarchic spirit of those dances in Woody's raucus playing on the old waltz, which is actually an old European waltz called the Cavalier Waltz, likely brought by German immigrants to Central Texas during their great migration in the 1840s. When Woody kicks off the opening notes, you can hear echos of the wailing opening syllables of the song The Cattle Call, written and recorded by cowboy singer Tex Owens in 1934 for Decca Records. They are the same notes as the opening phrase of the Cavalier Waltz, but when Woody puts in that plaintive cry, they're not the same, either.
Woody playing his fiddle with Pete Seeger at the first concert at the
Music Inn in Lenox, MA, July, 1950, hosted by Alan Lomax.
Guthrie probably learned to play the fiddle from Jeff Guthrie, his father's half brother, after he moved to Pampa, Texas when he was eighteen years old. He learned to play the guitar, Maybelle Carter style, backing up his uncle at local square dances. "Old champ fiddlers," he once said, "want the guitar to stay purely down at the bottom of the stack, and they make you pluck or pick it their way so as to ride in and out and down around on their fiddle bow (without) your banjo or your guitar ruining their fiddle piece." There is a fiddle that belonged to Guthrie on display at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Carved into the top is an inscription, "This Machine Kills Fascists," identical to the declaration that graced his old flattop guitar. 
The Cowboy Waltz snuck through the back door into the old-time repertoire when it was recorded by the New Lost City Ramblers for Folkways Records in 1964, for an album called String Band Instrumentals. The archtypal old-timey revival group followed the original Guthrie recording pretty closely, with John Cohen reprising Bess Hawes laconic mandolin introduction, Tom Paley providing the guitar, and Mike Seeger playing fiddle with the same Guthrie gusto, though perhaps with a bit more precision than the original.
I've posted two videos of my own setting for The Cowboy Waltz, in open D tuning (aDF#AD). The video directly below is a solo performance at my computer, picking on my semi-fretless 1928 Tubaphone, from July, 2013. The second, attached below, is a street performance in Harvard Square with my friend and busking partner Ed Britt, recorded a month later. In that video, I'm picking my 1964 Ode Model 42, which has a Shatten pickup installed, to make amplification much simpler. I try to get Woody's mournful wail in those opening notes with a pair of luxurious string bends.
There are two other renditions of the Cowboy Waltz posted here on the Banjo Hangout, by Janet Burton and Steve Parker, and both are excellent, proving that you can clawhammer a waltz, with fine results!
Janet Burton playing The Cowboy's waltz, with Kit on mandolin
Steve Parker playing The Cowboy's Waltz
So ease your troubled mind today, and take some time to work up this fine country waltz. Make it sound just like a poor, lonely cowboy singing a sweet love song to his heffers.
- Don Borchelt
Edited by - Don Borchelt on 01/19/2017 22:26:02
JanetB - Posted - 01/20/2017: 14:22:49
Thanks for covering Cowboy Waltz, Don, and sharing your more plaintive but lovely take on it. The comparison to Cattle Call gives me a different perspective. The comparison to Gum Tree Canoe is something I'd never thought about before.
My Plinky and Plunky duet with Kit was actually picked. I was in aDGBD tuning. So here I've tuned to double C and made tab to go along with this new take. I even changed a few notes to match Woody's. Kit and I first heard Heidi Claire, formerly of the Reel Time Travelers, play it at a Grass Valley music camp one year. She said it was a traditional last waltz at dances. It was sure pretty.
Don Borchelt - Posted - 01/26/2017: 12:09:57
Janet, very nicely played as always. Dwight, according to the Fiddler's Companion, The Cavalier's Waltz, which is virtually identical to The Cowboy Waltz, is of European origin, although I could find no other confirmation of that. But if that is correct, then I think it is more likely that the Wednesday Night Waltz, which as you point out is remarkably similar to the A part of The Cowboy/Cavalier Waltz, probably was injspired by the latter, rather than the other way around. Again according to The Fiddler's Companion, the Wednesday Night Waltz we all heard when we started out came originally from a 1927 recording by the Leake County Revelers, whose fiddler, Will Gilmer, said he picked it up "out in Texas somewhere." Here is the only version of The Cavalier Waltz I could find, by a group of Civil War re-enactors who call themselves the 2nd South Carolina String Band.
I went to the Boston Common with my daughter and granddaughter last Saturday for some sort of gathering or another, and saw this banjo picker channeling Woody. I wonder how many got the connection? By the way, I made an error in my original post- Woody's fiddle is carved with the inscription "This Machine killed 10 fascists."
Edited by - Don Borchelt on 01/26/2017 12:20:05
Don Borchelt - Posted - 04/06/2017: 12:21:03
Mark (mswzebo) wrote: "This is the first waltz I've learned clawhammering and I look forward to others. Any suggestions?"
Mark , I play a few waltzes on the banjo, and would like to learn more myself. Maybe my favorite among the few I play now is an obscure tune called Roscoe Parish's Waltz. Parish was an old time fiddler and banjo player from Coal Creek, Virginia, who played a lot of unique and unusual tunes. He was recorded by Alice Gerard and Andy Cahan back in the '80s, and you can here him playing his waltz here, on the Slippery Hill website. Janet Burton has a lovely version she posted back in 2013, you can listen to that here on the BHO. According to the Fiddler's Companion, it is a waltz time version of an old Scottish jig called The Muckin' o' Geordie's Byre, which Samuel Bayard collected from a half dozen Pennsylvania fiddlers and fifers under the title Lassie, Art Thou Sleeping Yet. His transcriptions are in his collection Dance to the Fiddle, March to the Fife. Here is the field recording of one of those fifers, Hiram Clinton Horner of Westmoreland County, recorded in 1960. You can decide if you think it is the same tune. Kind of sounds like it to me.
Hiram Horner playing Lassie, Art Thou Sleeping Yet
I won the BHO Waltz on the Banjo contest with this tune back in January, 2014. About four months ago, Roscoe Parish's granddaughter posted a thank you on my YouTube page, saying that she was "glad to hear his beautiful music lives on." She went on to comment that:
He was extremely talented in so many things, yet so humble. He made my brother and fiddle, and me a banjo. They are priceless to us. Music was such a big part of his life.
That is an epitaph few of us could live up to.
Edited by - Don Borchelt on 04/06/2017 12:21:58
g3zdm - Posted - 04/23/2017: 16:05:08
I play the original Scots jig (Muckin' o' Geordie's Byre) occasionally; I knew it as song long before I came across the instrumental thanks to growing up hearing Andy Stewart sing it.
If you hang on in until about 1:40 in the following rendition, Andy does 1 verse in Queen's English in lieu of broader Scots 
youtube.com/watch?v=7XgMxKP_Jcs
I found, being familiar with the jig, it was pretty easy to play along with Don's Parish's Waltz.
Chris Muriel, Manchester, UK
Don Borchelt - Posted - 05/02/2017: 07:13:00
Chris, YouTube tells me that your video is blocked here in the states, due to copyright issues. Wow, them Scots are sure getting feisty over there!
Very nicely played, Aaron (ackeim), a lovely rendition. It sounds to me like you have your uke tuned like a tenor guitar, rather than something similar to the standard reentrant tuning used for a soprano ukelele. I gather that it is customary that the dog does not have fleas once you leave the standard uke aside.
Thanks, Geoff, Brendan and Chris for the nice comments. Chris, you don't hear too many jigs in the Appalachian fiddle repertoire. Are they common in Missouri?
- Don Borchelt
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