TOMMY JARRELL
( An excerpt from the liner
notes of the dvd “Legends Of Old Time Music” by Mark Humphrey )
What could be more poetically
perfect than a legendary old time musician living in the Blue Ridge Mountains in
a community named Mt. Airy? That he was the embodiment of a tradition (some
would say its last great one), son of a fiddler in a legendary 1920s stringband
(Ben Jarrell of DaCosta Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters), and a one-time
moonshiner besides, surely heightened the romance. Little wonder so many young
city musicians fascinated by old time music and the world it represented made a
pilgrimage to Mt. Airy, North Carolina to bask in the earthy music and aura of
Tommy Jarrell. “Everyone who visited found their admiration of his artistry
augmented by gratitude for his devotion as a teacher and his warmth as a host,”
wrote Alan Jabbour in Sing Out!
Born in the Round Peak area of Surry County, North
Carolina in 1901, Jarrell grew up in a close-knit community where apple
peelings, bean stringings, and corn shuckings were still occasions for communal
work punctuated by drinking and music making. Tommy watched his fiddling father
“like a hawk” as well as a reprobate uncle, Charley Jarrell, who might show up
“high as a buck” with a new tune retrieved from a neighboring county. Beyond
the Jarrell family, there were such musical neighbors as a Civil War veteran
named Zack Payne, the source of some of Jarrell’s oldest fiddle tunes, and
legendary claw-hammer style banjoist Charlie Lowe. Music was a constant in
Jarrell’s family and community life, but his livelihood (from 1925 to 1966) was
earned as road grader for the North Carolina State Highway Department. John
Henry was a tune Jarrell recalled Uncle Charley bringing home (along with a new
fiddle and homemade whiskey) from Allegheny County. “He’d go up on the high
part,” Jarrell told Ray Alden, “and use a long bow, and then he’d come out on
the end of his stick and kind of jiggle it.” Here Jarrell plays a variant of the
tune on fretless banjo.
On the County album, Sail Away Ladies, Jarrell
offered this detailed memory of Drunken Hiccups: “Right here’s a little tune
that my Daddy learned from old man Houston Galyen up at Low Gap, North
Carolina, I guess before I was born. And he called it the Drunken Hiccups.
Well, they play a tune out yonder around Nashville, Tennessee, they call Rye
Whiskey. And a lot of folks in this country calls it Jack o’ Diamonds. Daddy
said that old man Houston said the right name for it was Drunken Hiccups, so
here she comes.” John Brown’s Dream finds Jarrell in his role of mentor to two
celebrated admirers, Alice Gerrard on fiddle and Mike Seeger on banjo. Though
never a professional musician, his significance as transmitter of tradition was
acknowledged and rewarded in his later years by the appearance of several
recordings (most on the Virginia-based County label), a National Heritage Award
from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a documentary film, Sprout Wings
and Fly. Tommy Jarrell, who likened music to “a big wheel that goes round and
round, just as even as can be,” died in 1985 in the county of his birth, Surry,
North Carolina.