I have chosen out Little Maggie as this week’s TOTW. A lot of people think it is a Bluegrass tune, but the tune can be traced back to the end of end of the 1800’s. The song's lyrics, often about a woman who is drinking and moving from suitor to suitor, are part of the "Darling Corey/Country Blues/Hustling Gambler" family which were found in the Appalachian region in the late 1800’s.
Recordings
Fiddler Tommy Jarrell from Mt. Airy, North Carolina remembered the tune "goingaround" the Round Peak area when he was a teenager around 1915 or 1916, and became quite popular with the younger folk. Tommy Jarrells version can be heard here (recorded in the 60’s and 70’s:
The earliest recording I have found is “Little Maggie With A Dram Glass in her hand” by Grayson and Whitter from 1927.
Another older recording is by Wade Mainer from 1937. This version may be of interest because Ralph Stanley was influenced by Wade Mainer, and Ralph first learned to play two-finger banjo listening to Wade Mainer.
There are also a lot of contemporary Old-Time version of Little Maggie. Here are some :
Little Maggie is usually played in the Mixolydian mode (major scale with a flat 7th), but many versions contain slides and chokes/bends. On banjo it is usually played in G tuning, but I have heard version in sawmill tuning (more to play in Dorian mode).
The Bluegrass version today usually seems to have the chord progression: G G F F G D G G, but earlier recordings had different progressions:
Grayson and Whitter 1927: G G D D G C G G
Wade Mainer 1937: G G F G G G G G
Stanley Brother 1948: G G F D G D G G
Tabs
I have made a tab containing examples of several styles: myself thumb lead, clawhammer Tommy Jarrell, early two-finger Ralph Stanley, and early three-finger Ralph Stanley (see attached pdf file).
I've always loved this version, by early 1960s Greenwich Village weird genius Sandy Bull. Also check out his banjo version of "Carmina Burana Fantasy", too. Played in a variety of styles, too; clawhammer, uppicking and bluegrass.
My first exposure, ca. 1960, to traditional mountain music and banjo playing, was the Riverside LP Banjo Songs of the Southern Mountains, which included Obray Ramsey’s version of Little Maggie—he was a singer who came to the banjo as an adult, at the suggestion of Bascom Lunsford. He played in a three-finger style that shows bluegrass influences, but isn't bluegrass
Good choice, Jan, with thorough coverage, as usual! It's a good challenge to go through those tabs you posted.
I learned the song hearing Doc Watson, so I turned to his video to arrange something: Doc Watson with some bluegrass greats. Mine is a very mixolydian, clawhammered version. Notice the lowered fifth string, something I would rarely do.
Coincidentally, one of my favorite BHO contributors, Ken Elkington, uploaded his Ralph Stanley version two days ago: Ken picking Little Maggie.
I confess, at first I was a little surprised at Jan’s choice for tune of the week, but as I read his presentation, I realized that he has written an effective treatise describing through this one example how deeply bluegrass is rooted in the traditions of old time. I’m sure Ralph Stanley would have agreed with him. In his autobiography, Ralph mentions that when they were kids, he and his brother would listen late at night to J.E. Mainer on one of the clear channel pirate radio stations that would broadcase from just over the U.S. border in Mexico, and Little Maggie is one of the Mainer recordings Ralph mentions. I think you can see the old mountain influence in Ralph’s own musical journey. When Ralph recorded Little Maggie with his brother in 1947 for Rich-R-Tone, they played the tune in the key of G, with Ralph picking the banjo in open position. When the brothers recorded it again in 1960 for Mercury, they are in the key of C, with Ralph apparently capoed on the 5th fret (though I suspect he is on 4, with the banjo pitched a semi-tone high). Moving Ralph’s voice up to the higher pitch completely changes the ambience of the song, giving it that old time, high lonesome mountain feeling that Ralph became known for, especially after Carter passed and he went solo. In the video posted by Jan, Ralph has moved back down to the key of B, which is where he performed it when I first saw him at Beanblossom around 1967 or ’68, and immediately decided maybe I didn’t want to sound just like Earl Scruggs after all.
One point about Ralph’s picking. As Jan has shown in the Stanley two finger/index lead tab, Ralph deliberately avoids playing the open 2nd string, and whenever he is playing the 3rd as a melody note, he is fretting the 3rd string at the 3rd fret, and then choking it up, but not all the way to the major 3rd. if you listen closely, you will hear that Ralph sings it that way as well, sliding into what is sometimes referred to as the neutral tone, the tone between the frets (and the reason I play a semi-fretless banjo).
On this issue of Mixolydian. The names of the modes were first transcribed by Aristoxenus, a student of Aristotle in the 4th Century BCE, and basically he named them after the region where the particular mode was prevalent. We don’t really know what the modal scales were that he assigned to each name, because music notation hadn’t been invented yet. Over a millenium later, Christian monks developed over several centuries the first system of musical notation in order to transcribe the traditional plainsong chants that their abby choirs had been singing for centuries. What drove the effort to create a written record was not just the desire to preserve the ancient chants, but also to assist the Vatican’s effort to enforce musical uniformity from region to region, so that throughout the Christian world, everyone would be singing the ancient chants the same, without all the bothersome regional variation. They had read Aristoxenus, so they assigned the same names to the modes that he had first assigned. Of course, at that time they had no way of knowing which scales actually applied to each name, so they took what was a good guess, and probably guessed wrong. But even in the Middle Ages, most singers were not raised to follow the experts’ strict diatonic scale, and the neutral tone at the 3rd and 7th degree of the scale was often what the generally illiterate monks would typically sing if left to their own devices. Their more scholarly choir directors would scold them for it, and would have pulled their hair out had most of it not already been shaved off. Among the common people, especially in Appalachia, that modal ambiguity never changed as the centuries wore on. So if you listen to old time fiddlers like Henry Reed or Edden Hammons, you will hear that neutral tone in many of the tunes we think of as Dorian, like Shady Grove, or Greasy Coat. It’s also true that tuning the fiddle in ways other that the modern standard tuning also goes back to the Middle Ages.
I love Sandy Bull’s stylistic tour de force that Andy posted, and I have also been a big fan of Obray Ramsey, going back to the late 60s when I first found one of his Prestige International albums in a Zayre’s cut-out bin. Ken does a wonderful job on it too, with some great variations that still sound firmly rooted in the mountains. I think Ken should try a semi-fretless banjo at some point, the result would be awesome. And, of course, Janet just nails it, as she does every week!
I dug around on my hard drive, and discovered I had video recorded a version of Little Maggie twelve years ago. I am three finger picking my semi-fretless Tubaphone in a D modal tuning (aDGAD). That’s the only place I could sing it!
On this issue of Mixolydian. ........... But even in the Middle Ages, most singers were not raised to follow the experts’ strict diatonic scale, and the neutral tone at the 3rd and 7th degree of the scale was often what the generally illiterate monks would typically sing if left to their own devices. Their more scholarly choir directors would scold them for it, and would have pulled their hair out had most of it not already been shaved off. Among the common people, especially in Appalachia, that modal ambiguity never changed as the centuries wore on. So if you listen to old time fiddlers like Henry Reed or Edden Hammons, you will hear that neutral tone in many of the tunes we think of as Dorian, like Shady Grove, or Greasy Coat. It’s also true that tuning the fiddle in ways other that the modern standard tuning also goes back to the Middle Ages.
This about Modes, and neutral 3rds and 7ths are very interesting. I spoke to a Swedish traditional fiddler and he said that these 3rds and 7ths occurred a lot in traditional Scandinavian music too.
The neutral 3rds and 7ths are pitched outside the normal diatonic scale. I call use to them "in-between-notes". They are outside the normal scale, but has belongs to the overtone series (harmonics series) of the tonic or dominant, so in a way they have a closer connection to the tonic or dominant, than the other notes in the scale. However, the use of fretted instruments and piano have made that those notes have been lost.
By the way, you play a wonderful version of Little Maggie, and it is absolutely right to play on a fretless banjo (or semifretless).
A great tune, My first exposure to it was on the Kingston Trio's first album in 1958, where Dave Guard played the banjo. Started my banjo journey that year, I was 14.
