Red Steer
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Transcription: by Darryl D. Bush
"Red Steer". also known as "Brown's Dream" or "John Brown's Dream" is an American reel<br> in cut time and A Major. It is played in GDgd or AEae fiddle tuning. The "Red Steer" version<br> of the tune is sourced to the playing of fiddler John Dykes (c.1882- 1940's?) of the<br> Kingsport, northeast Tennessee, area (on the border with Virginia), leader of the<br> Dykes Magic City trio, which also included Myrtle Vermillion on autoharp and Hub Mahaffey<br> on guitar (with vocals sometimes later supplied by Dykes' brother-in-law, Dock Boggs).<br> Kingsport at the time was boosting itself as the "magic city” because of it’s progressiveness.<br> An article in the Kingsport Times on February 18th, 1927, reported "The Kingsport Trio, known<br> as John R. Dykes’ String Band… were introduced by Kiwanian T.R. Bandy [who] announced that<br> this trio had been selected out of a group of 50 such organizations by the Brunswick<br> Phonograph Company, of New York, to make records."<br> The trio recorded "Red Steer" in New York in March, 1927, for Brunswick records, although<br> the 78 was not released until January of the following year ("Red Steer" was backed with<br> "Callahan's Reel"). The reel is a member of the "John Brown’s Dream” family of tunes and<br> is a tune associated with another fiddler, Fiddlin' Cowan Powers (1879-1953), who was active<br> in the teens and twenties in the same southwestern Virginia/northeast Tennessee area, who<br> had recorded it in 1924 (as "Brown's Dream").<br> The banjo tablature is by John Letscher. His notes:<br> from the Dykes Magic City Trio. Learned at the Gettysburg Jam.<br> It was printed in Clare Milliner & Walt Koken's Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle<br> (2011).<br> It was recorded by Dykes Magic City Trio on Dykes Magic City Trio: Complete Recordings,<br> originally recorded on a Vocalion (Brunswick) 78 (1928).<br>
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