"This is the first tune my grandpaw always played. He loved this tune, but he didn’t know its name, so we just named it John’s Tune, because John was the name of my grandpaw." 

–Ralph Roberts

For this week’s TOTW, I am submitting a tune I learned from Ralph Roberts, a wonderful old time fiddler from Frametown, West Virginia.  He taught this tune to Don Couchie and I one evening at Clifftop, back in 2012.  Ralph passed away this past May, at the age of 97, in the VA nursing home in Clarksburg, West Virginia.  He was a truly gentle man.  Here is the recording of John’s Tune from our session with Ralph up on Geezer Hill some 14 years ago.

John's Tune, Clifftop 2012

It became a yearly ritual, playing  John's Tune around the camp, but it wasn't until 2019 that I finally got things set up to make a video:

The link below connects to a tablature of my arrangement of John’s Tune, in tabledit format. The tab includes my three finger version, plus a clawhammer banjo version that also follows Ralph’s fiddling closely. I have also attached at the bottom both the three finger and clawhammer tabs in PDF format; both are in standard G tuning (gDGBD).

John's Tune Tabledit Tablature

I first met Ralph at Clifftop back in 2009, the second year I went to Clifftop, and the first year I camped.  One evening, his wife, Charlee, pulled me aside to tell me that Ralph was “kin to the Hammons.”  Later I would learn the details.  His grandfather John, for whom the tune is named, was married to Emmy Hammons, the daughter of Paris Hammons.  Ralph’s grandfather learned John’s Tune from Pete Hammons, who was the brother of both Paris and Edden Hammons.  It has been suggested that the tune may have come originally from Edden.  I went back and listened to all the tunes in the Edden Hammons Collection, recorded back in 1948 by Louis Chappell for West Virginia State University, to see if any of the twenty or so tunes could be the source for John’s Tune, but none sounded anything like it. 

The recordings I made of Ralph Robert’s beautiful mountain fiddling were by no means the first.  Jimmy Triplett recorded Ralph back in 1996, when he was working as an apprentice for Gerald Milnes of the Augusta Heritage Center. 

Here is the recording of Ralph playing John’s Tune for Jimmy Triplett, back in 1996.  Triplett called it John Robert’s Tune:

John's Tune, Ralph and Jimmy Triplett

This was part of a longer interview with Ralph, which you listen to here.

Jimmy Triplett's Interview with Ralph Roberts

Now, you might notice something different between Ralph’s version of the tune in 1996, and when he played it with Don Couchie and I in 2012 and 2019.  When he played it with us in 2012, he repeated a four beat phrase just before the end; in the banjo tab, it is represented by measures 9 and 10, and that phrase is then repeated with a little variation in measures 11 and 12.  But in the 1996 performance, he doesn’t repeat that phrase.  Sadly, it’s too late to ask him about it, but my guess is, he just decided one day to try doing it that way, and realized he liked it better.  And that reveals a lot about how Ralph felt about old time music, a view that was shared by a lot of the old mountaineers I met when I first started going to festivals over 50 years ago.  To them, the music was not rigid, not cast in stone.  Back then, an Appalachian fiddler or banjo player, when learning a common tune, would often change it around a bit to make it their own.  I am reminded of something the fiddler Lester McCumbers once said to Erynn Marshall, when she asked him if he played a certain tune made famous by another West Virginia fiddler, “I don’t like to play it like he did. I try to play it the way I play it.”

In  2007, Triplett mentioned Ralph in an extensive article he wrote on West Virginia fiddlers for the Old Time Herald.  He said this about Ralph:

“There were a bunch of fiddle players…who were really influential on me, not so much because of the tunes they played but because of the way they played their music.  There were a few guys I met that knew maybe 20m or 30 tunes, but they had a sweet, almost gentle way of playing.  One of them was Ralph Roberts.  I really love the way he approaches the tunes, especially when he’s playing solo.  You know, they’re just these straight-forward old-time fiddle tunes, but he just does something really nice with them.  He doesn’t crowd it with a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff, he goes right to the essence of the tune and breathes this really gentle and joyful life into it.  I love his versions of tunes more than just about any others.”

Triplett has said it better than I could.

Ralph was close friends with a man who became sort of a legend in old time music, the fiddler and banjo picker Dwight Diller.  When I first met Dwight in 1993, at the Maryland Banjo Academy, he wasn’t playing the fiddle.  He told me once when he was visiting Ralph and Charlee’s camp at Clifftop that it was Ralph who got him started on the fiddle, and by then I think he had pretty much switched sides.  He confided in me that he could not follow Ralph’s fiddling, so he got Ralph to take up the banjo, so they could still play tunes together.  Dwight passed away in 2023.

I played tunes with Ralph for the last time in August of 2021.  This was the second year the Clifftop festival had been canceled because of Covid, and so instead I visited Ralph and Charlee for a week at their home in Frametown.  They had a wonderful log house along Frametown Road, and while I was there Charlee made us a wonderful dinner of squirrel and gravy!  Now, every time I see a squirrel in my backyard, I get hungry!  The weather was perfect, and most of the week was spent playing tunes on Ralph’s porch.  While I was there, two of Ralph’s pals that I knew from Clifftop came by to fiddle and chat with us, Dr. Mac Bailes from Gassaway, and Herb Broadbent from Ivydale.  I videotaped a few of the tunes Ralph and I played together, which you can find on my YouTube page, but for some reason, John’s Tune was not one of them.  

About six months later, in January, 2022, Ralph had a visit from a young banjo picker, Leo Shannon, who is originally from Seattle, but now lives in Whitesburg, Kentucky.  Shannon is the banjo picker for the Onlies, He videotaped the two of them playing John’s tune in Ralph’s parlor. 

If there is another old time musician on this planet who is as mesmerized by Ralph and his fiddling as I am, it is Takaki Kosuke, aka Bosco, from Kyoto, Japan.  Jimmy Triplett took him around to visit a number of Appalachian fiddlers including Ralph, in 2008.  He videotaped his own fiddling of John’s Tune in December of that year, with his friend Ken Inoue accompanying him on banjo.

Charlee passed away in 2023.  Shortly thereafter, Ralph moved to a VA nursing home in Charlestown, West Virginia.  I did not get back to the Clifftop festival again until 2024, when Don Couchie swung by Boston to pick me up on his way down.  On two different days during the course of the festival we took a side trip up to see Ralph at the VA home.  We brought our instruments, and played for him all of the tunes that he had taught us that he did his own way; tunes like Ragged Shirt, Callaway, another Callaway, Cherry River Line, Old Horse and Buggy, Muddy Road to Ducktown, Yew Piney Mountain, Abe’s Retreat, Sugar Hill, Liza Jane, Cumberland Gap, and of course, John’s Tune. 

If you would like to know more about Ralph's amazing life, you can read the wonderful obituary that was posted on Legacy.com.  I have attached a copy here:

Ralph's Obituary

Back in July, 2020, I wrote an article about Ralph and John’s Tune for the Banjo Newsletter, while it was still publishing.   I did finally make my own video picking the tune, sitting in my living room. 

Ralph, I hope I did right by your grandfather’s tune.  May you rest in peace.
 

John's Tune, Clawhammer Style

John's Tune, Three Finger Style

Edited by - Don Borchelt on 07/17/2026 05:53:01