John Johnson: Strange Creek Fiddling, 1947. Produced by Danny Williams, West Virginia University Press Sound Archive 3. CD, WVU SA-3, P.O. Box 6295, Morgantown, WV 26506, 2001. $15.95. Available in the U.K. from Musical Traditions Records, 1 Castle Street, Stroud, Gloucestershire GL5 2HP, price £12.00 including postage and packing.

This CD is the third release from the University of West Virginia’s sound archive and features the superb fiddling of the young John Johnson. Its twenty-four tracks cover a wide variety of tunes, from slow airs to driving dance melodies, and from relatively ancient Virginian traditional material to contemporary Texas-influenced radio styles. Unusually the fiddle plays solo throughout, and any loss of tone caused by the home-made aluminium disc recording machine originally employed and its subsequent transfer to digital disc is more than compensated for by the clarity of sound finally obtained: raw, powerful, unobscured by banjo, guitar or studio effects, every detail available to the ear. A booklet containing photographs of John and his fiddle, an extract from his autobiography and the reminiscences of friends and his sister accompanies the CD.

The recording was made in the summer of 1947. Folklorist Louis Chappell, Professor of English at West Virginia University in Morgantown, was completing the final leg of a ten-year project recording the singers and fiddlers of West Virginia. That year he had rented a room in Summersville to use as a recording studio. The thirty-one year old Johnson lived nearby at Strange Creek, Braxton County, and when approached by Chappell remarked that he hadn’t played a violin for years and didn’t even own one. Luckily Chappell had brought a spare one along with him, and the two men spent the next two days recording eighty aluminium discs for the University archives. These recordings are now part of the West Virginia and Regional History Collection at West Virginia University and this is the third CD to have been released from the archive, following on from recordings of Edden Hammons.

Johnson was an interesting character. He learnt old-time fiddle from Cheney Armstrong, a champion fiddler in his time and seventy-two years old when he taught Johnson, staying in the Johnson household for two years to teach the boy. Later Johnson joined the army, then travelled widely in the States as an itinerant worker and fiddler. He was the master of many manual trades, a poet, painter and athlete of repute. He possessed an amazing memory and could remember a tune after hearing it only once. He liked to make a tune his own, putting his personal stamp on it with crooked bars or variations in the competition manner, but later in life he also liked to play one tune in a variety of styles, copying each of the well-known radio performers of the day.

The music on this recording is that of a young man, full of energy and skill but somewhat lacking in sensitivity and expression. The playing is impressive but possibly not as outstanding as one is led to believe by the sleeve notes. On the other hand this may be explained by him not having played for some time before making the recording, and the effect of doing so seems to have inspired him to take up the fiddle again and develop his talent much further. He was rated very highly by many of his contemporaries, and Chappell was said to have thought him the equal of the great Edden Hammons, whom he had personally recorded a few days earlier.

Of the tunes on the CD, some, such as Sally Ann, Turkey in the Straw and Mississippi Saywer are standards. Others are unusual; for example the fine slow air called White Pilgrim which is reminiscent of Bonaparte’s Retreat. There is a particularly noteworthy version of Forked Deer, demonstrating the ‘crooked’ style (where the fiddler adds or removes a few extra notes or bars, rendering the phrase lengths crooked or uneven) which is so distinctive of American music from this region. The disc demonstrates the power and rhythmic accuracy of Johnson’s bowing very well, and also displays the fiddle playing in several cross-tunings. What it doesn’t quite manage to do is capture the other element of what John Blisard in the sleeve notes calls ‘The defining element of John’s fiddling’, that is to say the amazingly rich full tone his bowing produced, even on a poor, cheap instrument.

Sadly this recording and its companion discs in the archive in West Virginia are the only recordings that Johnson made, so we cannot compare them with his later playing. It is clearly a field recording, rough and ready and with the odd mistake to make a fiddler chuckle (for example it sounds as if the end of Johnson’s bow has slipped off the string at one point). On the other hand it is a very enjoyable listen. The absence of backing instruments makes it particularly useful for fiddlers wishing to learn this style of playing; the absence of commercial studio effects almost makes it sound as if Johnson is in the room playing to you. John Johnson died in 1996.