Snow Drop Ann?

[Steven Hedgpeth]

I recently learned "Snow Drop" from listening to Bob Flesher and watching Rebekah Weiler on YouTube (gCGCE tuning). But scanning through the "Minstrel Song Cross Reference Index" inWeidlich's The Early Minstrel Banjo: Technique and Repertoire I found that there's a tune titled "Snow Drop Ann" in Gumbo Chaff's 1851 Complete Preceptor for Banjo (page 16?). Do any of you have or know that tune? Is it possibly related to "Snow Drop"? I'd love to hear it.

(BTW: If this isn't the right to ask such a question, forum-wise, somebody please tell me the correct way.)

[Greg Adams]

This is a perfectly acceptable way to write to this forum. It works for me. What is the Youtube link of the Flesher-Weiler tune in question? That'll help in identifying the tune's possible musical relationship with the Gumbo Chaff 1851.

[Trapdoor2]

Now that would be very cool if they were related. The OT staple "Snow Drop" was first recorded by Kirk McGee back in the 1930's (as I recall). It is a popular contest tune...I'll check it out this evening.

[Steven Hedgpeth]

The versions I've learned it from are Bob Flesher's version on his Old -Time Clawhammer Banjo album and a YouTube video of Rebekah Weiler playing it at a fiddler convention in Tennessee:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq-J97M5dl0

Neither staff notation nor tab of the tune are included in Weidlich's book.

The isolated naming of two different tunes "Snow Drop (Ann)" just seems so unlikely to me.... It's such an unusual putting-together of words.... at least where I'm from. Maybe in parts of the country where there's more snow it is a commonplace term because there's a need for such a distinction, a la Sapir-Whorf's Inuit.

Greg Adams said:

This is a perfectly acceptable way to write to this forum. It works for me. What is the Youtube link of the Flesher-Weiler tune in question? That'll help in identifying the tune's possible musical relationship with the Gumbo Chaff 1851.

[Trapdoor2]

Here's a link to the Christy Minstrel's 1847 version: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/8339

[John Masciale]

FYI, Snow Drop is not an unusual combination of words. Snow Drops are some of the first flowers that bloom at the end of winter. Now, the thing to do is to compare the melodies. The 1847 version posted is the same as in the 1851 Gumbo Chaff (different keys, same basic melody). I didn't notice any particular similarity between these and the recording you posted. This week is very busy or I'd record the Gumbo Chaff version for you. If nobody else posts it I'll try to record the Gumbo Chaff verion next week.

[Steven Hedgpeth]

Thanks. The reference to the speaker's heart being blue in the chorus struck me at first to be a kind of "blue gum" joke. The further verses indicate, though, that he has some problem for which matrimony is the only cure--lovesick blues, I guess. I wasn't expecting to see the word blue used for depression or sadness that early (1847). The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins tells me that that use of blue goes at least back to Washington Irving's first publishing it in Salmagundi in 1807 and also relates it to 18th century ideas on drunkenness.

Trapdoor2 said:

Here's a link to the Christy Minstrel's 1847 version: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/8339

[Trapdoor2]

I thought it was very interesting to see the reference to a "daggertype". The process was only about 6 yrs old...I wonder if this is the first song that carries a photographic reference?