In the 2018 TOTW thread on Doc and Merle's Frosty Morn (banjohangout.org/archive/345781), the consensus was that Frosty Morn and the Cold Frosty Morning of the old-time jams are separate but related tunes. Both that thread and this one are now archived, so I'm starting a new topic. After digging into this for a few days, I've come to think they may simply be the same tune, Henry Reed's, travelling down two different roads. I'd love to hear what you think.

1. A single known source. Alan Jabbour recorded Henry Reed playing Frosty Morning in Glen Lyn, Virginia, in 1966. As far as I can find, that recording is the only known source for this melody. Jabbour himself found no British or Irish antecedent, and his field notes only say that Reed learned it from the same man who taught him Folding Down the Sheets.

2. The road to the Watsons. Jabbour brought Reed's tunes to the Durham-Chapel Hill revival bands, and the Fuzzy Mountain String Band recorded Frosty Morning in 1971. Jim Collier tells the story (in a PineCone video) of playing the tune on banjo at a party at Willard Watson's house: Doc asked him to sit with him on the couch and show it to him, then took the banjo and had it in a few passes. In the reissue notes to the Watson Family recording, Doc says he learned it from Jim Collier. So the Watsons' version would be only a few steps away from Reed, through the revival.

3. The name. Reed, Jabbour, the Fuzzy Mountain band and Doc and Merle all called it Frosty Morning. The "Cold" seems to have been added later (Armin's thread, banjohangout.org/archive/403507, traces it to a 1973 tab book). That's what makes it look like two tunes, and it also mixes it up with Melvin Wine's Cold Frosty Morning, which really is a different tune (A major, from his father), and with the Scottish/Culloden story, which belongs to yet another melody.

4. What the notes show. Looking at Jabbour's transcription of Reed (via the TuneArch ABC, put into sawmill for banjo), the first bar of the high strain runs on the 1st string 0, 2-3, 5-5-5-7-5, 2-0. The common jam opening (e.g. Hilarie Burhans: 0-5-5-5-5-7-5-0) keeps the repeated notes, and the Watson / Billy Strings opening (0-3-5-7-5-0) keeps the climb. To my ear, both look like ways of condensing the same bar of Reed's. Victor Furtado's version, to my ear, is the closest of all to Reed's fiddle.

So rather than two related tunes, I'd suggest one tune with two branches that drifted apart over 50 years of tapes, jams and different instruments. I may well be missing something, so corrections are very welcome.

Sources: Jabbour's transcription and the recording at the Library of Congress (Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection); Jim Collier's video at PineCone; the "Henry Reed, Alan Jabbour and the Origins of Cold Frosty Morning" video (Howdown History); TuneArch, Frosty Morning (1) and (2).