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LyleK - Posted - 08/15/2024: 19:09:36
Audio availability of the tune
This week the "TOTW" is "Old Bob." To start with, this is not Garry Harrison's "Ol' Bob" (sometimes known as "Old Bob") but is instead Gusty Wallace's "Old Bob". This would be the point where I would give links to a bunch of YouTubes and *.mp3s of "Old Bob." Sadly, there are very, very few such resources, at least that I have been able to find (Beware: there are lots of such resources for Garry Harrison's "Ol' Bob" but not for Gusty Wallace's). I first heard the tune on Bruce Greene's CD "Five Miles of Ellum Wood" where "Old Bob" is the last track. There are two recordings that Bruce Greene made of Gusty Wallace playing "Old Bob." One recording Greene made on Nov. 14, 1973 using a cassette tape recorder. That recording is here from 12:25 to 14:04. I think this is the source for the Slippery-Hill *.mp3 , which, for once, I recommend that you skip. The Slippery-Hill *.mp3 is not a good copy (sounds like it was recorded in an echo chamber), and in any event, Greene's cassette tape recorder had a "drag" early in the recording of "Old Bob." Greene made a better recording on Dec. 18, 1975 . Greene chopped the 11 tunes that Gusty played for this tape (see track list here) into individual files, such as the one above that is just "Old Bob." If you want to hear the other 10 tunes go here.
Where did the tune come from?
Unlike many Kentucky tunes that have multiple sources, Gusty Wallace seems to be the only source for "Old Bob". So sayeth tunearch.org/wiki/Old_Bob . So, where did Gusty Wallace learn the tune? As much information as seems to be available comes from Bruce Greene's 1973 recording. I've transcribed the relevant information from the recording, where GW is Gusty Wallace and BG is Bruce Greene. Some of the taped conversation is difficult to follow, so I did the best that I could:
BG: Did your father play that too?
GW: That "Patty on the Turnpike"?
BG: Where'd you learn that off of?
GW: I don't know. I just heard somebody play it somewhere. Or a record, you know.
BG: Do you know where he learned that "Old Bob"?
GW: That "Old Bob"?
BG: Yea
GW: He learned most of it himself. Somebody kind of started him like that…and he learned that you know…and nobody else played it…'cause I heard it.
Was "Gusty" Gusty Wallace's first name?
No. His full name was Robert Gustavus Wallace. His headstone has "Robert Gusty Wallace." Burt Feintuch has "Gusty's" name as Robert Gustavus “Gusty” Wallace. I hear you. Who was Burt Feintuch? He was Bruce Greene's mentor when Bruce Greene was an English major at Western Kentucky University. See here for an inventory of Feintuch materials from when Feintuch was at Western Kentucky (that's where I got Gusty's full name). Together Bruce Greene and Burt Feintuch produced a two album set: "I Kind of Believe it's a Gift: Field Recordings of Traditional Music from South Central Kentucky." Only three of the tracks on that are by Gusty.
What else is known about Gusty Wallace?
The definitive source is Bruce Greene (1997). I've extracted just a bit from that article, which includes quotes from Gusty:
Gustace "Gusty" Wallace was born in Hart County, Kentucky, on November 24, 1890. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to neighboring Sulphur Well, where he lived for the rest of his life. His father was one of the most renowned old time fiddlers in that part of Kentucky, and Gusty was inspired by him to learn to play.
"My dad, his name was Addison. They called him Ad, you know. Ad’s father went to kind of a musical one time. They was playing all these pieces… He says, ‘I wish Ad was here.’ –– That was my daddy, you know –– And they said, ‘Why, Mr. Wallace, there’s a lot of people here can play these pieces.’ He said, ‘I know it, but there ain’t none of ’em can give it that little whiff of the bow that Ad’s got.’
"I started playing at seven. My dad would go to work and left the fiddle on the bed. I played it while he was at work. I played two or three little pieces before he knew it… ‘Shortening Bread,’ ‘Bound To Have a Little Fun’…"
Gusty began to play for dances by the time he was twelve or thirteen and continued to do so all his life. In the 1930s, he fiddled professionally with the Bob Atcher band in Louisville, and later on with the Prairie Ramblers in Des Moines, Iowa, hobnobbing with Clayton McMichen and Sleepy Marlin along the way.
Gusty had a little shack out behind his house –– his "music room" –– where he could go and play for hours without disturbing his wife, Ella. We had many a long session there, interrupted only by the hour when the Lawrence Welk show came on. We would go in and sit with Ella, and Gusty would say, "Now that’s real music."
Gusty died in 1985 at the age of ninety-five, when his house burned down. He was trapped upstairs. One of the last of the old generation of south-central Kentucky fiddlers, he was a living example of the importance that the old timers placed on being faithful to one’s cultural as well as family traditions:
"My father died when I was seventeen years old, and I never will forget what he said. He called me to the bed, and he said, ‘Well, it’s left up to you to do the playing now.’"
Was Gusty a direct descendant of William Wallace (of Braveheart fame)?
This might seem like an odd question, but… in an email from Bruce Greene on February 17, 2017 cited in Kirby et al. (2018) there is:
"Wallace [Thompson] was a close relative of Gusty Wallace, a cousin maybe. They played together quite a bit. The Wallaces and Thompsons all claimed to be direct descendants of William Wallace, the Scottish freedom fighter. They were also all Mormons. Go figure."
Well, he was probably not a direct descendant, but maybe a great, great, …, great nephew. Here is what I have been able to reconstruct of his genealogy where I have skipped many, many individuals. I've just given a direct descendant who may have been a brother of William Wallace, the first Wallace to cross the Atlantic (and die in Virginia when it was still part of a British colony), the first to have been born in that Colony but die in the state of Virginia, the first to be born in Virginia but die in Kentucky, the first to die in Metcalfe County, KY, Gusty's father, and Gusty.
Sir Malcolm "Alan" 1st Laird of Elderslie (near Glasgow) 1249-1307
Dr. Michael Wallace, Sr. (born May 11, 1719, Galrigs, Ayrshire, Scotland; died Jan 1767, King George, VA, British Colonial America)
John Wallace (born Jan 19, 1761, died May 4, 1829, Liberty, King George, VA)
William Wallace (born Feb 4, 1784 Culpeper, VA, died Adair, KY, buried Yates Burial Ground, Edmonton, KY)
Gustavus A Wallace (born 13 February 1813, Adair, KY, death 8 APR 1889 Center, Metcalfe Co and buried there)
Addison Shackelford Wallace (May 5, 1848 Liletown, KY, died 1908, buried LDS Cemetery)
Robert Gustavus Wallace (born November 24, 1890, Sulphur Well, KY, died March 21, 1984, Metcalfe, KY, buried LDS Cemetery)
Are you ever going to get to the tune?
Yes, finally. I tried to do this in clawhammer, but it did not work well, at least not for me. Consequently, I did it in two-finger picking. I've been playing clawhammer for almost 50 years now. I had struggled with three-finger (aka bluegrass), two-finger, and clawhammer, prior to meeting someone who could show me how to play clawhammer. This was in the mid-70s when resources for learning clawhammer were slim to none. When I was 17 years old, I met 16-year-old twins Kelly (of "Mando Mafia" fame) and Kevin Perdue. Kevin was a kicka__ bluegrass and clawhammer player, and he showed me the methods behind clawhammer. Once I had that, I never turned back. So, I've only been playing two-finger (poorly) for the last few weeks. Consequently, I am not at all happy with the *.mp3 I'm posting. It took me 12 minutes of fumbling around on a recording until I got something at the end that was somewhat usable.
Is it index lead or thumb lead?
Yes. It is both. Index-lead can be done using clawhammer. You use the index (or middle) finger as usual and then drop thumb for the following note. Thumb lead doesn't translate to clawhammer well, which is why I switched to two-finger. Below is the tab (which I'm happy with) and the *.mp3 (which I am not happy with). If you look at the tab, up to measure 11 it is index-lead, then to measure 20 it is thumb-lead, then measures 22 to 28 are index-lead. This tab shows me why I was so confused long ago about two-finger. Does it have to be index-lead versus thumb-lead? If you go way back to banjohangout.org/archive/319492 it looks like it is permissible to mix the two. As an extra added bonus, if you go to measures 24 and 25 I've thrown in some tricks that come pretty directly from Bill Keith-style melodic bluegrass.
References
Greene, B. (1997). Romance of the Kentucky Fiddler. Fiddler Magazine, 4(2), 5-10.
Kirby, R., Haywood, J., & Kingsolver, A. E. (2018). Somewheres on the track: Place, art, and music in Eastern Kentucky. In D. B. Billings & A. E. Kingsolver (Eds.), Appalachia in regional context (pp. 189-212). Louisville, KY: University of Kentucky Press.
Edited by - LyleK on 08/16/2024 13:10:08
JanetB - Posted - 08/18/2024: 18:18:32
Great choice, Lyle, and what a stupendous presentation, complete with recording and tab!
The songs on the CD "Five Miles from Ellum Wood" have entranced me for quite a while. I had begun a tab for Old Bob and never finished it until now, so thanks for the motivation. The measure count is certainly unique on my tab. 9, 10 and 9 measures. Bruce Greene is a master at finding and playing crooked tunes. I divided Old Bob into three parts so I could add an alternate C part down-the-neck.
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