Reed, was born on April 28, 1884, in the Appalachian Mountains of Monroe County, West Virginia. Reed was a master fiddler, banjoist, and harmonica player whose amazing repertoire consisted of hundreds of tunes, as well as multiple performance styles. His music conveyed tradition while setting new directions, and became a touchstone for academic research into the history of U.S. fiddle music. Henry Reed learned the overwhelming majority of his tunes by ear and retained them by memory. As a boy he learned from elderly musicians like Quince Dillion, who was born around 1810 and served as a fifer in the Mexican War and the Civil War. As a youngster, Reed learned to read music, played alto horn in a local band, and picked up a few additional tunes from sheet music. It seems he never played professionally, yet he did play occassionally for local dances and in countless home music sessions. As musical talent ran in the family, several of Reed's children learned to accompany him.
Reed's musical influence broadened significantly after 1966 when Karen and Alan Jabbour, graduate students at Duke University, began to audio tape his fiddling. Although he originally recorded Henry Reed for academic purposes, Alan Jabbour, an accomplished fiddler himself, also introduced members of the Hollow Rock String Band to the tapes. Tunes like "Over the Waterfall," "Kitchen Girl," and "George Booker" soon became core elements of the band's repertory, and Reed's name was credited. Since the band was at the epicenter of an old-time instrumental music revival that emerged in the Durham/Chapel Hill, North Carolina area in the late 1960s, Reed's music was passed from musician to musician at fiddlers' conventions, festivals, and jam sessions, and through the audio tapes. At the age of eighty-three Reed began to enjoy wider recognition for a lifetime's labor of love.
The titles of Henry Reed's fiddle tunes are redolent of the old Appalachian frontier. Tunes such as "Cabin Creek" and "Shooting Creek" commemorate the arterial network of Appalachian rivers and creeks. "Forked Deer," "Ducks in the Pond," and "Hell Among the Yearlings" evoke the woods and countryside. "Santa Ana's Retreat" and "British Field March" conjure up episodes in American military history.
Henry Reed's recordings and Alan Jabbour's transcriptions of them reveal a complex syncopated bowing style used by fiddlers from Virginia to Texas in twentieth-century recordings. The evolution of this style among fiddlers of the Upper South represents an important feature of American culture. It appears to have evolved in the Upper South in the early nineteenth century and diffused from this area with westward migration. Its syncopated patterns possess an African-American influence that first appeared during the Early Republic, when perhaps half the fiddlers in the Upper South were African-American. These patterns have influenced the shape of American music ever since -- from the minstrel stage of the 1840s through ragtime, blues, jazz, country music, and rock-and-roll. "At a Georgia Camp Meeting," for example, was intended originally for the "cake-walk," a popular dance of the ragtime era.
The melodic style of many of Reed's tunes such as "Shady Grove," "Cluck Old Hen," or "Betty Likens" also suggests the influence of American-Indian music (from the Eastern Woodlands and Plains). In contrast to the typical European tonal pattern, these tunes begin in a high pitch and cascade to a lower pitch. Henry Reed's music descends directly from the early fiddlers of the Upper South, both black and white, who achieved a dramatic cultural synthesis of European, African and, perhaps, Native American musical forms and concepts. These musicians helped to launch and shape the character of what some claim is America's greatest cultural contribution to the world -- American music. Reed, who died on February 8, 1968, embodied that music's varied vitality and ensured its continuance.
- Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier is a field collection of traditional fiddle tunes performed by Henry Reed. Browse it by Musical Genres for tunes that evoke the history and spirit of Virginia's Appalachian frontier. Some strains lay dormant, in the repertory of a few elder musicians, until they are rediscovered by the next generation and pass back into wider circulation. Hear, for example, Reed's version of "Salt River," a tune recorded by Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys in 1964 under the title "Salt Creek," and the piece "Breakdown in A" which joined the modern bluegrass repertory after Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys recorded it as "Clinch Mountain Backstep."
- Uncover the historical and musicological dimensions of Henry Reed's tunes by reading the "NOTES" written in Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier. For example, the bibliographic records for "Santa Anna's Retreat" and "West Virginia Gals" contain fascinating details about each piece.
- Get "goin' down to Cripple Creek and have some fun" by comparing Henry Reed's version of "Cripple Creek" in Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier with a vocal version by the King Family in Voices from the Dust Bowl, 1940-1941. Also, compare Henry Reed's version of "Barbara Allen" with accompanied and unaccompanied vocal versions by:
- Many people use sheet music to learn tunes Reed most likely acquired by attentive listening. See the sheet music for nineteenth and early twentieth-century tunes such as "My Little Girl," "Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder," and "Arkansas Traveler" in Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920. Then, search on these same titles in Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier to hear Reed's uniquely rendered versions.
- The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress has contributed a number of collections to American Memory. See these collections to learn more about American folk culture:
