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