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Originally posted by RB3

Here’s a tablature for a Scruggs style arrangement of the “fiddle tune” Angeline Baker.  It’s a tune that also often shows up as Angelina Baker or Angeline The Baker.  Angelina Baker is also the title of a song composed by Stephen Foster in the 19th century.  I don’t know if the fiddle tune, as we know it, is derived from Foster’s composition.

Angeline Baker.tef

Angeline Baker.pdf

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A nice, crisp arrangement, Wayne, nails it perfectly.  Fiddlers almost always play this in D, so anyone who is playing it at a jam will need to remember their capo.  To my ear, it is very loosely based on the old Stephen Foster song that he first published in 1850, called Angelina Baker.  The lyrics are from the point of view of an old slave whose lover has been sold down river by their master.  Here is a no nonsense performance, piano and voice, of the original sheet music.  See if you hear any similarities with the fiddle tune:

Stephen Foster's Angelina Baker

Like My Old Kentucky Home, I think Angelina Baker is evidence that Foster's music, in it's original form, unadulterated by later Lost Cause reinterpretations, was anti-slavery.  

I hope things are well back in the Queen City.  I believe our old friend Mack Smith has passed.  I miss those days.

- Don B.

Don,

Thanks for the kind words. A slave's loved one being sold down the river seems to have been a common theme for songs of the 19th century composers. Darling Nellie Gray is another.

I had heard of Mack's passing. Just about all of my old musical accomplices are gone.

The Queen City is the same ever. As Mark Twain said, "It's a good place to be when the world ends; everything here happens ten years later".

Thanks for your arrangement. I think Angeline Baker is a wonderful tune, with a lot of opportunities for own interprettations. The Old-Time fiddle tune is usually played in the key of D, but I have tried to play in the key of A, in the same melody and same pitch - both the verse and the chorus end wit an A note but a D chord, instead I try to end it with an A note and A chord with chord progressions as in A and not in D.

I have studied both the fiddle tune and Foster's version, and they have both similarities and differences. I think the fiddle tune is derived from Foster's version, but it would be interesting to to know the whole development chain. Or was it just a fiddler who once listened to a minstrel show with Foster's version, and then some years later tried to remember it and more ar less improvised the modern old-time version?