By most measures Ryan’s
Mammoth Collection: 1050 Reels and Jigs, printed in 1883 in Boston,
Massachusetts, by publisher Elias Howe, is a
remarkable volume of music. It contains
skeleton versions of old English, Irish and Scots reels, jigs, hornpipes and
clogs, strathspeys and flings, “Ethiopian melodies,” ‘straight jigs’, newly
composed tunes with topical titles, and regionally popular or significant
instrumental melodies. Musicologist
Charles Wolfe dubbed it (referring to its almost identical but more recent
incarnation as Cole’s 1,000 Fiddle Tunes)
in 1986 “the most popular fiddle book in American history,” a status scarcely
diminished in the beginning of the 21st century. In his article “The Fiddler’s Bible: A Brief
History” (“From the Fiddling Archives,” The
Devil’s Box, No. 21, vol. 4, Winter 1987, pp. 37-47) Wolfe established the
collection’s importance, citing numerous contemporary prominent fiddlers who
either currently played tunes from the volume or had learned repertoire from
it. These included John Hartford (identified as an authority on the book and
its history), Buddy Spicher, Paul Anatasio, “Big Howdy” Forrester, Georgia Slim
Rutland, Mark O’Conner and James Bryan. Tunes from the volume were part of the
standard repertoire at New England dances and contests
in the 20th century, contended the author, as they were in the Midwest
“especially northern Missouri and
Nebraska…where fiddlers there
still use tunes from it in their repertoire, and talk about its authors.”
Furthermore, maintained Wolfe, Ryan’s Mammoth was
influential well beyond the borders of the United
States, especially in the Canadian Maritime
Provinces, as evidenced recordings by Cape
Breton fiddlers Angus Chisholm and
Winston “Scotty” Fitzgerald, and Nova Scotia/Boston fiddler Tom Doucet.
Overseas the volume also was significant.
A Scottish publication, Kerr’s
Merry Melodies, published in four volumes, contains a great many of the
Ryan melodies, often note-for-note.
Other Kerr tune versions are only slightly altered from those that
appear in Ryan, perhaps, for example, by a change of key. What seems clear, however, is that publisher
Kerr was trying to imitate on the other side of the Atlantic the comprehensiveness
and inclusiveness of Ryan’s Mammoth
Collection, and that the Scottish volumes (albeit printed without a date)
were published after Ryan’s. Irish
guitarist Paul de Grae, a student of Sliabh Luachra, County Kerry, music, has
found the Ryan volume was known in southern Ireland, and influenced musical
repertoire in that region.
Wolfe cautions that the influence of Ryan’s Mammoth has not been universal
among fiddlers, even in America. One had to have the ability to sight read,
for one thing, and written music was little utilized in areas where aural
transmission was the mode of learning.
The Upland South in the United States
is an example of an area in which the volume seems to have made little lasting
impact on fiddling repertoire, he finds.
Apart from the pockets of isolated traditions and archaic-based fiddler
repertoire, Ryan’s Mammoth had more
to do with shaping both the reality of what we now consider “traditional”
fiddling, and our perception of what traditional fiddling was and is, than any
other volume printed in North America.
It is helpful at this point to understand where the
volume came from, and who compiled and published it. Fortunately, Elias Howe
has been ably researched by Wolfe, and uilleann piper and folksinger Pat Sky (who
edited modern reprints of Howe’s 1000
Jigs and Reels and Ryan’s Mammoth
Collection for publisher Mel Bay
and who wrote well-researched and extensive forwards to the editions) has more
recently investigated both Howe and William Bradbury Ryan. The following is
culled from both their researches.
Music publisher Elias Howe was born
in Framingham, Massachusetts,
in 1820, the last of five children.
Although he found his first employment with a neighbor as a plowboy,
Howe obtained a violin tutor and found time to learn and play the fiddle as a
teenager. Moreover, he began to collect
tunes from other fiddlers in the area and copied them into music commonplace
books, a standard practice at a time when printed music collections were
relatively rare. “His music commonplace book became very popular,” writes Sky;
“local musicians and friends constantly borrowed it to use as a source book for
tunes to play at local dances.” Quick to recognize a marketable opportunity,
Howe convinced a Boston publisher
to print the manuscript, offering to “work his legs off to make the book
successful” in lieu of payment up front. His Musician’s Companion was published in 1840, printed cheaply and
crowded with melodies, and Howe indeed sold it door-to-door until he was able
to purchase the plates himself. With
those in hand he opened his first business in 1842, in Providence,
Rhode Island.
For a hundred years, from 1750 or
so, on both sides of the Atlantic, music publishing,
music retailing, and musical instrument sales and repairs were generally
handled under one roof, as a diversity of services was required to capture
enough trade to float the business. Howe’s establishment was in the same mold
(he also advertised umbrella repair!). He continued to publish in his
successful niche, adding to his catalogue of publications by adapting his
original tune collections from Framingham
and freely adding to this core pool by scouring earlier printed publications
for material. In 1845 he merged
businesses with a Boston publisher
and for the next five years continued to expand his music publishing empire. In
1850, however, Howe sold much of his catalogue of publications to the larger
Oliver Ditson Company, and bought an estate in his home town of Framingham. The contract with Oliver Ditson prohibited
Howe from publishing for a period of ten years, which he seems to have largely
honored, although he continued to collect and compile material in preparation
for the future. In fact, Wolfe finds,
Howe did issue important volumes in the late 1850’s through other publishers,
including a precursor to Ryan’s Mammoth
called The Leviathan Collection of
Instrumental Music (J. H. Mellor, Pittsburgh, 1858), containing 500 dance
melodies—the first of Howe’s huge one-volume collections.
In 1860 Howe returned to
publishing under his own name, re-established himself in Boston
just at the start of the American Civil War. In addition to publishing, he
manufactured drums for the Union Army and sold fifes to the numerous
newly-forming martial organizations. Declining a government offer to serve as
Director of Bands (which came with a rank of Lt. Colonel), Howe concentrated on
supplying the government all he could sell with regard to musical instruments
and publications. Some of the most
popular of the latter items were his fife tutors (e.g. Army and Navy Fife Instructor, 1861), understandably in demand for
training new military musicians.
Ironically, finds Sky, “Howe discovered after the war that the majority
of the books were distributed to the Rebel armies,” probably through a Kentucky
firm.
Elias Howe
It was around the end of the conflict that William
Bradbury Ryan came to work for Howe in Boston.
Ryan remained with Howe for some 30 years, until the latter’s death in 1895 (Ryan’s
own obituary was printed by the Boston Globe in 1910, notes Sky). Ryan was a
musician as well, the leader of at least one band operating from the firm’s Boston
address in the 1860’s. In fact,
numerous bands either operated out of or were booked from Elias Howe’s shop at
103 Court Street, including some of the most influential musical groups in the
city: Christie’s Quadrille Band, Gilmore’s Band, The Metropolitan Brass Band,
Rowell’s Quadrille Band and Edmond’s Quadrille Band, along with [W.B.] Ryan’s
Band. These organizations, writes Sky,
were of two general types—brass bands and quadrille bands, the latter employing
a variety of instruments for dancing, fronted by violins, cornets and
clarinets. Howe and Ryan sold music for
all of them, including completely orchestrated music for the quadrille bands.
The firm published two huge collections of music at this time; The Musician’s Omnibus (c. 1864) and Howe’s One Thousand Jigs and Reels (c.
1867), both economically printed and relatively affordable. Wolfe points out
the latter was probably the first tune book to use the word breakdown to describe a fiddle tune.
It was in 1882 that Ryan and Howe published the last
of the firm’s huge omnibus collections, a volume initially entitled William Bradbury Ryan’s Mammoth Collection,
although the work was copyrighted in 1883 with the title simplified as Ryan’s Mammoth Collection. It contained
many of the Howe catalogue of tunes that had been garnered over the years from
European and American sources, many reprinted numerous times in earlier Howe
publications. The music is dance music—fiddle music, or de facto fiddle music
(if not written specifically for the instrument)—the airs and slower melodies
that made up large sections of Howe’s earlier works having been discarded.
Moreover, an important element of new material is contained in the volume—newly
culled music from other publications, band music from the mid-19th
century, new-composed melodies with topical titles, and a sampling of tunes
that were either currently popular or had currency in the years following the
Civil War. The result is that melodies that were sometimes a hundred and fifty
years older were interspersed with then-modern, topical melodies. In fact, much
of this latter material can be associated with specific trends, fads,
personages, structures, entertainers, novels, and other and varied aspects of
the 1870’s and early 1880’s, especially in the Eastern-seaboard centers and
particularly in Boston and New York.
Why is this important to us? First, Ryan’s
contains a wonderful selection of English, Irish and Scottish dance
music—a summary, really, because the
tunes chosen for inclusion were some of the most popular and enduring of the
preceding century-and-a-half; the cream that rose to the top. This was the
music of social dancing in group format—the round (circle) and square dances,
and longways (contra) dances--dances that were indicative of a mode of
entertainment that emphasized the community, not the individual. They
flourished in a pre-industrial, largely rural and agrarian base where group
cooperation (as, for example, to get the community fields plowed or the harvest
in) was desirable and necessary. In the
1880’s the industrial revolution was in full swing—several generations old in
some areas—but America was still largely rural and agrarian, and still had a
continental frontier to develop. Group
social dancing was still popular in many areas of the country, although it was
fading fast, especially in urban areas, but in 1880 it was still actively in
demand. By the next generation—the turn of the 20th century—music
for these dances would already be characterized in advertisements as ‘old
fashioned tunes…as danced by our fathers’ and square dancing seen as a
‘revival’ activity in many areas. The selection of this older music appearing
in Ryan’s is admirable, and one may deduce from the number of truly exceptional
and deserved old melodies included that a skilled and knowledgeable ear was
involved. Moreover, it was one (Howe’s? Ryan’s?) that was thoroughly familiar
with both musical repertoire and with group dancing (frequently, for example,
dance directions are outlined below older tunes). Notably absent from the
collection are ballroom dances (i.e. couple dances), such as waltzes, polkas,
schottisches, two-steps etc.
The second great significance of Ryan’s Mammoth is as a snapshot of
popular instrumental music and culture in the eastern United States at the
beginning of the 8th decade of the 19th century, a
formative period for American traditional fiddle music—‘old time’ fiddling.
These Ryan titles and music referenced art, entertainment, technology,
politics, public works, and dance fashions of the era. As a broad generalization, most collected
volumes of music of interest to fiddle players reflect the decade or two
previous to the publication of the volume, for it takes time to collect,
select, edit, transcribe and print a collections-worth of music. This places
the time of the gathering of the modern, regional melodies in Ryan’s during the 1870’s, or perhaps
from the end of the Civil War (it cannot be coincidence that this corresponds
with the time Ryan was first employed by Howe!). Historically, this coincides with the Reconstruction period
following the American Civil War (1866-1877); or, the Presidencies of Andrew
Johnson (1865-1869), Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877), and the post-Reconstruction
Presidencies of Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881) and James Garfield (1881).
In fact, among the ‘political’ melodies in Ryan’s
are two hornpipes named for period Presidents, “President Grant” and “President
Garfield,” the latter dispatched at the hands of a disgruntled low-level
bureaucrat who had been spurned for a position in the year prior to the initial
publication of the volume. Both were composed by the elusive Harry Carleton,
about whom nothing to date is known (it may have been a pen name). Carleton
contributed a number of tunes to the collection, as did his counterpart Frank
Livingston (“…apparently a New York
songwriter who either performed or wrote fiddle tunes,” notes Wolfe). Several of Carleton’s tunes belied Northern
or Union themes, while Livingston’s
titles generally were associated with Southern themes. The juxtaposition of the two writers seems
very deliberate—an attempt at balance, and an appeal to those of either
sympathy. Carleton penned a reel entitled “General Sheridan,” while on the
preceding page we find Livingston’s “General
Longstreet’s.” All of the above were named for men who played prominent roles
in the Civil War, yet Ryan’s is remarkably free of references to the
great conflict.
When viewed in context of the “modern” Ryan titles
one understands that the reference to the men is as to contemporary
Reconstruction figures, and only secondarily as wartime heroes. Tellingly, Grant’s title is President,
not General. James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s trusted second in command
in the Confederate Army, became a public figure after the war and was
befriended by Grant, who appointed him U.S. Minister to Turkey in 1880
(Longstreet also became a commissioner for the Pacific Railroad and a U.S.
Marshall for the District of Georgia). Phil Sheridan was a fighting cavalry
general in the Union Army during the Civil War, but had a subsequent famous
career “pacifying” the Native American tribes on the Western Plains; later an
administrator and senior officer, he retired in 1883 with a rare fourth star.
Wade Hampton, whose name is attached to another of Livingston’s
hornpipes, was a famous and successful Confederate cavalry commander who reinvented
himself after the war and became Governor of South Carolina. At the time of Ryan’s
publication, Hampton had moved on
to serve in Congress as a United States Senator from his state. Ben Butler
(“Ben Butler’s Reel”) was a politician who was appointed a general in the Union
army and served (with some controversy) in the Mississippi
theater of the war. Afterwards he
reverted to pol, and, at the time of Ryan’s publication in 1882 had just been
elected Governor of the state of Massachusetts.
Other Ryan tunes with martial titles have
more to do with 19th century politics than any great conflict. The “7th Regiment Reel” references neither a
be-gloried Civil War unit, nor Custer’s famous but doomed cavalry regiment of
Indian fighting days. Rather, it was composed (as Don Meade has found) in honor
of the 7th Regiment of the New York National Guard, an upper-crust
unit formed decades before the war, headquartered in the old armory at the foot
of 3rd Ave. The 7th saw active duty in 1861 for several months, then
returned home, their original commitment to the Federal government having been
fulfilled (hardly the stuff of glory, although they did see “action” in 1863
during the huge New York city draft riots, when they were called out to help
quell the disturbance—in fairness, however, many from the 7th transferred to
active duty regiments as saw hard service). A period song poked fun at them (to
the tune of the “Star Spangled Banner”):
‘Tis true for our country
they went for to fight,
And offered their service in
proud manly manner,
They went for a month or
longer to stay,
But soon the got home-sick,
and had to surrender…
The
“7th” is better-known among Irish fiddlers as a hornpipe variant
called “The Flowing Tide,” and also caries the titles “Picnic Reel” and (in
O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, 1903) “Higgin’s Best” (presumably because it
was composed by another elusive character, Conn. Higgins, to whom it is
attributed in Ryan’s).
The “Pulaski Guards Reel” was named for one of the
premier militia units of Boston,
founded in the mid-1830’s. The unit catered to the city’s society, and, in the
years before the war paraded for picnics with other elite units and the area’s
premier brass bands, including the Ned
Kendall’s Boston Brass Band (see “Oh, Ned”, Tune History, Fiddler Magazine,
vol. 10, No 4) and the Brigade Band of Boston, with cornet virtuoso John
Bartlett.
Two other Ryan titles bear special mention in the
‘political’ category, the “De Golyer Hornpipe” and the “Tammany Ring Clog.” The
former is apparently a joke, for the melody is attributed to “Garfield”
by Ryan, a play on the scandal that involved him in his pre-Presidential
days. Garfield, a Republican
congressman at the time, prepared briefs regarding the merit of a certain
pavement, and presented them before a congressional committee. When later a
scandal broke having to do with the paving-contract with the government, his
political opponents tried to make much of his involvement, although it is
unlikely he actually did anything wrong. “Tammany Ring” is named for the
associates of the infamous political machine in New York
City in the 1870’s, led by “Boss” Tweed,
head of the Tammany Hall Democratic Party.
“President Garfield’s” has been recorded by Wild
Asparagus and Natalie MacMasters, and has entered repertoire on the other side
of the Atlantic through recordings of the Boys of the
Lough, Brendan Begley, Paul O’Shaughnessey and Paul McGratten. “President
Grant’s” can be heard on albums by New Hampshire
stalwarts Bob McQuillen and Rodney Miller, and by Charlie Walden and Robin
Bullock. Texas and Midwest
fiddlers have picked up “General Longstreet’s,” which appears on recordings by
Tony Ludiker, Dale Morris, Ed Carnes and by Cape
Breton fiddler Jerry Holland. “Wade
Hampton’s” hornpipe has even entered Northumbrian pipers’ repertoire, probably
through its inclusion in a Kerr’s volume, subsequently picked up in
Northumbrian collections.
There is so much more of importance and interest to
explore in Ryan’s Mammoth Collection. Future Tune History articles will
explore other aspects of the volume.
References:
Sky,
Patrick, ed. Howe’s 1000 Jigs and Reels.
Mel Bay
Publications, Pacific, Mo.,
63069. 2001.
Wolfe,
Charles. “From the Fiddling Archives: Number 41 in a Series – The Fiddler’s
Bible: A Brief History,” The Devil’s Box,
vol. 21, No. 4, Winter 1987, pp. 37-48.
[Thanks to Don Meade for generously sharing
his research notes on Ryan’s Mammoth,
and for welcome encouragement; and to Pat Sky, for his spontaneous gifts.]
06/11/05
Andrew Kuntz
8 Veatch Street
Wappingers Falls NY
12590
aikuntz@optonline.net