Blackberry Blossom is the tune bluegrass pickers use to measure each other. It is a G major reel whose melody spells out its own chords, and it turns up at jams everywhere. Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith cut the record that fixed its modern shape in 1935. Doc Watson, Norman Blake, and Tony Rice then turned it into a flatpicking rite of passage.
Where it came from
The name is older than the tune most pickers know. The Traditional Tune Archive reports that Kentucky fiddlers played tunes called Blackberry Blossom before the Civil War. The oldest branch of the family is a modal reel from eastern Kentucky, known today as Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom. Blind fiddler Ed Haley (1885 to 1951) made it his showpiece. A story in Jean Thomas’s book Ballad Makin’ in the Mountains of Kentucky claims that James A. Garfield, the future president, named it during the Civil War. In the tale, Garfield heard harmonica player Christopher Columbus Morrison play it and asked its name. Morrison had none. Garfield spit tobacco juice on a blackberry bush, and the tune had its title. Historians doubt the timeline, but the name stuck. Thomas recorded fiddler Ed Morrison playing it for the Library of Congress in 1934.
Dick Burnett, the Kentucky musician, recorded the old tune with Oscar Ruttledge in Atlanta on April 19, 1930. Columbia released it as Blackberry Blossoms on disc 15567-D.
The tune we jam on today is different. Country music historian Charles Wolfe tells the story in The Devil’s Box. Arthur Smith, a fiddler on WSM radio in Nashville, played a breakdown that had no name. The station held a contest to name it. Mail poured in by the bushel, and a listener in Arkansas won with Blackberry Blossom. Smith recorded it in New Orleans on January 22, 1935, with Alton and Rabon Delmore on guitars, billed as the Arthur Smith Trio. Bluebird issued it on B-5896. That side set the melody almost every player uses now.
How it works
The tune is a two-part reel in G, played AABB at jams. The A part is a stream of eighth notes that falls from the top of the scale. The chords change fast beneath it, and the line outlines each one on the way down. The B part drops into E minor and leans on the five chord before the tune climbs back to G. That major-to-minor shift gives the tune its shape. You always know where you are.
Jams love it because the melody teaches the chords. A guitarist who has never heard it can find the changes inside the fiddle line. It sits well on fiddle, flattop guitar, mandolin, and banjo, and it rewards a clean right hand at speed. That is why it shows up at fiddle contests and guitar contests alike. It reads as intermediate on paper. Played fast and clean, it will test anyone. If you are building a jam repertoire from our songbook, learn this one early.
Recordings worth hearing
Start with the Arthur Smith Trio’s 1935 Bluebird side. It is the source of the modern setting, with Smith’s long bow strokes over the Delmore brothers’ guitars. Burnett and Ruttledge’s 1930 Columbia disc preserves the older Kentucky tune, worth hearing to grasp how far the family spreads. Rounder’s Grey Eagle collects Ed Haley’s 1946 home recordings of Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom, raw and strange next to the jam version. Nashville session fiddler Tommy Jackson cut the tune as a 1955 single and carried it into the square dance record era. Doc Watson picked it on guitar at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, released by Vanguard, and showed flatpickers what a fiddle tune could be. Norman Blake made it the title track of his 1977 Flying Fish album Blackberry Blossom. Mark O’Connor, then a teenage contest champion, stretched it on Markology (Rounder, 1978). Tony Rice’s cut on Manzanita (Rounder, 1979) is the flatpicking benchmark, the one guitarists still chase. Blake and Rice returned to it together on Norman Blake and Tony Rice 2 (Rounder, 1990).
Sources
Facts on this page come from the Traditional Tune Archive entry for the modern reel and its entry for Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom (the Jean Thomas story and the Ed Haley tradition), Praguefrank’s country discography for Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith (session date, personnel, and catalog number), the Discogs listing for the 1930 Burnett and Ruttledge Columbia disc, and Charles Wolfe’s research in The Devil’s Box on the WSM naming contest.