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Arkansas Democrat - 1936:
Legend Offers Only Light
About Origin of Popular Song, “Arkansaw Traveler”
An Arkansas Traveler, who
had become lost in the mountains, discovered a Squatter seated upon
a whiskey barrel near the door of his dilapidated cabin, and playing
a fiddle.
In the doorway were the
Squatter’s wife, Sall; four of his younger children, and the eldest
daughter, while seated in an ash-hopper a few yards away was the
eldest boy. A whiskey sign was over the doorway.
The Traveler asked for
whiskey and was told the Squatter had drunk the last that morning.
He asked for food and was informed “there wasn’t a d-d thing in the
house.” He asked for shelter and found there was only one dry spot
in the house.
Nor did the Squatter have
food for the Traveler’s horse.
During the conversation,
the Squatter continued part of a tune over and over again on his
fiddle until the Traveler said:
“Why don’t you play the
balance of that tune?”
To which the Squatter
replied:
“It’s got no balance to
it.”
“I mean why don’t you
play the whole of it?”
The Squatter paused in
his fiddling.
“Stranger, can you play
the fiddle?”
“Yes, a little,
sometimes.”
“You don’t look like a
fiddler, but ef you think you can play any more onto that thar tune,
you kin just git down and try.”
The Traveler got down and
played the whole of it.
After the Traveler
finished the tune, the Squatter told his son to get the whiskey,
instructed the wife and daughters to “sot the table,” had one of the
boys take the Traveler’s horse to the barn and invited the stranger
to make himself at home.
Tune Was Born
And- thus was born the
“Arkansaw Traveler,” a heel-tingling tune which had its beginnings
in the Ozark foothills of Arkansas and which is heard today wherever
the fiddle is played in America.
The tune has been set to
verse and the scene depicted on canvas, and those three factors –
the tune the words, and the pictures – have kept the “Arkansas
Traveler,” alive in the annals of American folklore.
Credit for the tingling
tune and its backwoods dialect is given in Arkansas to Col. Sandford
C. Faulkner of Kentucky, who came to Arkansas in 1829 and settled on
a plantation in Chicot county, although in some parts of the country
one Jose Tasso of Mexico City, an Italian is credited with composing
the tune.
Record reveals that in
1840 during a state campaign, Colonel Faulkner, traveling in the
Boston Mountains of north Arkansas, with a party which included
Ambrose H. Sevier, Chester Ashley, William S. Fulton, and Archibald
Yell, stopped at the cabin of a mountain squatter, where, according
to legend, “Colonel Faulkner “passed some banter” with the squatter
and later played the fiddle for him.
From this time the story,
words, and music were associated with Colonel Faulkner until his
death in 1874.
Although there may be
some considerable dispute regarding authorship of the tune and
words, there is no dispute as to the authorship of the picture,
which has become no less widely known than the tune.
The picture is the work
of Edward Payson Washburn, and was painted in 1858 at what was once
Norristown, Pope County, a flourishing community that with time had
disappeared like many other Arkansas towns.
Father Was Minister
The artist’s father, the
Rev. Cephas Washburn, a Presbyterian minister, came from the East in
1830 to take charge of the old Dwight Mission, located on the
Illinois Bayou, for the Indians.
The following year the
artist was born at the mission.
In 1850 the family moved
to Fort Smith, and young Washburn, who had displayed considerable
talent as an artist, was given several commissions to paint
portraits. He earned sufficient money to enable him to take a
course in Eastern art schools and for 18 months he studied at the
New York Academy of Design and under well-known New York artists.
His family was living at Norristown, an important river point, when
he returned and lived there until his death in 1860 at the age of
29.
The original painting of
the “Arkansaw Traveler” is the property of the artist’s niece, Mrs.
George Black of Russellville, whose mother was a sister of the
artist. Mrs. Black also has an original portrait of the artist,
painted by himself.
Young Washburn began a
companion picture to the “Arkansaw Traveler,” known as “The Turn of
the Tune,” which represents the break in the music as well as the
change in the squatter from surliness to cordiality. He died before
completing it, and the painter who finished the work is unknown.
The two pictures became
known as companion pieces, and their copies have been hung side by
side upon the walls of many a tavern, hostelry, and inn in the
Southwest, spreading to other parts of the nation.
The “Traveler” in the
picture is the likeness of Colonel Faulkner, a beloved Arkansas
character from 1829 to 1874, but it is impossible to say whether it
was painted from memory, from daguerreotypes, or from description,
and the complete picture is purely the work of the imagination, the
best available authorities believe.
The cabin in the picture
is fairly typical of mountaineer-squatter homes of the period,
whether in Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, or any
other unsettled foothill country and not peculiar to Arkansas.
The words of the piece
probably represent a collection of humor of the period rather than
the connected narrative of a single event.
The tune traveled far;
through America, to Ireland, to other foreign nations, and was heard
in countless taverns the world over, where its catchy, jig-rhythm
was the favorite of the fiddlers. |
