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"Icy Mountain" is an old-time breakdown in D Mixolydian. It is played in
Standard or AEae fiddle tuning. The parts are played AABB.
There is a song collected in Kentucky by this title but it seems unrelated to this breakdown piece. The tune in circulation by this title was collected from Ward Jarvis (b. 1894), originally of Braxton County, West Virginia (later of southeastern Ohio, where he moved in the 1940's to work in the timber industry), who learned it from a Clay County (W.Va.) left-handed fiddler by the name Frank Santy. The banjo tablature is by John Letscher. His notes: First heard from Bob Carlin, but, since John Lamancusa and I seemed to be the only ones playing the tune that way, it's written without the hinky Carlin stuff, which is available in Bob's Fiddle Tunes for Clawhammer Banjo book.Since John's banjo version uses A tuning (aEAC#E), I transposed Ward Jarvis' fiddle version to A Mixolydian. It was printed in Milliner & Koken's Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes (2011), Spadaro's 10 Cents a Dance (1980) and Lamancusa's The Gettysburg Collection of Old-Time Fiddle Tunes (2021). It was recorded by Michael, McCreesh, & Campbell on Dance Like the Waves of the Sea (1978), Bob Carlin on Fiddle Tunes for Clawhammer Banjo (1980) and The Rough Deal Stringband on The Rough Deal Stringband – Orange Album (2001). |