Page 61 - Blues Festival Guide Magazine 2019

As blues music emerged as a popular form and a dominant
force among African Americans in the early 1900s, many string
bands and jug bands began to incorporate blues repertoires in
order to stay relevant. Lonnie Johnson, widely recognized as a
blues guitar virtuoso, claimed the fiddle as his first love and spent
the early part of his career in New Orleans honing his skills as
a fiddle player. He played in his father’s string band as well as
on excursion boats along the Mississippi. He signed with Okeh
records in 1925 and went on to record violin on nearly a dozen
early recordings.
The Mississippi Sheiks, a guitar and fiddle band consisting
mainly of members of the Chatmon family, found great success
with their mix of blues and country music. Based in Jackson, MS,
they scored a hit for Okeh in 1930 with “Sitting on Top of the
Henry "Son" Simms (left) and Muddy Waters at Stovall Plantation in the early 1940s. World,” which was popular among Black and white musicians,
Photo by John W. Work, courtesy BluEsoterica Archives and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008.
Joe Thompson, 1918–2012, was one of the last fiddle
continent. The goje is a one or two-string fiddle from Nigeria. players in the Black string band tradition from the Piedmont
Snakeskin covers a gourd bowl to create a membrane head region of North Carolina. Thompson played fiddle and called
similar to a banjo. Horsehair strings are suspended on a bridge. dance sets in a band with his brother, Nate, and their cousin,
In Mali, the soku is a similar instrument. It uses snake or lizard Odell, both on banjo. They played for dances, both Black and
skin as well. It’s very possible that the early prototype for the white. He learned to fiddle from his father, who in turn learned
modern-day violin could have come to Europe by way of the
Moorish incursions. from his own father, a slave.
Of course, there were a wide variety of stringed instruments “Fiddle has been in the blues from the beginning,” says
around in 16th century Europe that the modern-day violin and its blues violinist Lionel Young, citing Charlie Patton, who often was
family could have eventually evolved from as well, such as the accompanied by Henry “Son” Simms. Simms led a Mississippi
lira da braccio, a bowed stringed instrument much like the violin
that was popular in the Renaissance period. The oldest surviving
violin is named Charles IX, made by Andrea Amati in 1564,
which supports the theory that Amati did indeed create the first
standard prototype of modern violins, or at least provides
physical evidence to justify this claim.
The Violin and the Blues
Early blues music emerged from the Black string band
traditions of the 19th century where fiddles and banjos were the
predominant voices, and guitars, a rarity. But Africans were first
exposed to European instruments on the slave ships that carried
them to the new world. Slave fiddling was documented as early
as the 1690s, and by the 1700s, Black fiddlers were as prevalent
as Black banjo players. Slave fiddlers would play for whites at
plantation balls and other entertainments. They were also often
encouraged by their masters to play for the dancing of their
fellow slaves. Black music thrived in ports along the Mississippi
River, and by the 1840s, New Orleans was known as the center
of Black fiddle music. Slaves in the region were often sent there
to learn the instrument, returning as trained entertainers to their
home plantations.
Following the Emancipation, many former slave musicians
continued to play professionally locally and as traveling
musicians, in places like town squares, local square dances and
traveling medicine shows. The fiddle remained hugely popular
due, in part, to its low cost and portability. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. Photo by BluesPhotosbyDonMcGhee

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