Black Mountain Rag is a cross-tuned fiddle showpiece and one of the most popular fiddle tunes in modern history, in the words of country music historian Charles Wolfe. It is also one of the most banned. The Walnut Valley contest rules disqualify contestants for playing it, and its cross-tuning breaks the rules at most other fiddle contests. A tune this fun was always going to get in trouble.
Where it came from
Fiddler Leslie Keith claimed the tune. Keith, who played fiddle on the first Stanley Brothers recordings, said he built it in the early 1940s from “a little bit of” The Lost Child, a recording by the west Alabama group the Stripling Brothers, and “a little of two or three of the Carter Family’s tunes.” He called it Black Mountain Blues, after a mountain in Cumberland County, Tennessee. The Lost Child supplies the basic melody, and some point to Lost Indian as an older ancestor still.
Curly Fox renamed it. His 1947 recording for King Records went out as Black Mountain Rag and sold over 600,000 copies, and the new name stuck (Charles Wolfe traced this history in The Devil’s Box, December 1982). In 1952, folklorist Ray Browne field-recorded the Stripling Brothers playing the tune themselves on a collecting trip for the Library of Congress, closing the circle on the melody they started.
Then Doc Watson got it. His flatpicked version on his 1964 debut album turned Black Mountain Rag into a guitar standard, and it has been a flatpicking rite of passage ever since. Watson’s version became so famous that later listeners sometimes credit him with the tune.
Which Black Mountain? Several have been suggested beyond the Tennessee one Keith named, including Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi. Mitchell went by other names in the past, first Grey Eagle for a rock formation on its side, later Black Mountain for the dark balsams at its top. A mountain named after one fiddle tune, suspected of naming another, is the kind of story fiddle history keeps handing out.
How it works
The tune runs three parts, AABBCC, with each part often varied on the repeat. Fiddlers most often play it in A or D, and it also gets taught in C.
The classic fiddle setting uses cross-tuning: AEac# (open A tuning) for the key of A, or GDac for G. The retuned strings ring under the melody and give the tune its rolling, wide-open sound. That tuning is also why you will not hear it in most contest rounds. Cross-tuning is banned on stage at Weiser and most contests that follow its rules, and the tune itself sits on the trick-tune ban lists next to Orange Blossom Special and Listen to the Mockingbird. In the Texas tradition it was a favorite trick fiddling piece, which is exactly the reputation contest rulebooks hold against it.
None of that stops anyone at a jam. Flatpickers call it constantly, and guitar players play it in standard tuning with no penalty at all.
Recordings worth hearing
Start with Curly Fox’s 1947 King recording, the one that named the tune, and Doc Watson’s 1964 version, the one that made it a guitar standard. From there the trail runs through the best fiddlers on record: Benny Thomasson on Texas Hoedown, Kenny Baker on Baker’s Dozen, Vassar Clements on Superbow, Tommy Jackson, the Dillards with Byron Berline on Pickin’ and Fiddlin’, Country Gazette live, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the all-star Will the Circle Be Unbroken sessions.
Sources
Tune history drawn from Charles Wolfe’s research in The Devil’s Box (December 1982) via the Traditional Tune Archive and the Fiddler’s Companion. The tune appears in the Fiddler’s Fakebook (Brody, 1983).