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The German origins of US-American fiddle tunes, that is, melodies for dances played primarily by fiddles but also other instruments, have so far received only very marginal attention. The following study offers a point of departure for future investigations by looking at the existing scholarship, historical musical practices, and eventually by presenting some concrete examples. In doing so, it relies on archival material, secondary literature, and on some original field research by the author in West Virginia, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania.
For a long time, research on American fiddle music has concentrated mostly on collecting fiddle tunes from regional traditions and identifying their origins and structural relations, but also on individual fiddle players, their stories and repertoires.1 These studies have often applied a paradigm of oppositions such as folk vs. popular (commercial), oral tradition vs. print culture, country vs. city, and Anglo-American vs. ethnic (immigrant) cultures. This simple paradigm is on one hand a result of prevailing romantic notions about American folk music in general. These are particularly noticeable for the southern regions of the Appalachian Mountains:
Virtually until the dawn of the twentieth century, the life of these mountain folk was as primitive as it was isolated [...]. They spoke an archaic language which was passed on from one generation to the next. In those southern hills, from the late eighteenth century on, everybody sang. Few homes did not own some musical instrument, a fiddle, a dulcimer, a guitar or a banjo.2
On the other hand, this paradigm can also be seen as a compensation for the lack of reliable primary information on fiddle music in the history of the United States. It has therefore been challenged by those who think that »[t]he story of the earlier musical life of the United States is beclouded, mainly, because far too much of the actual music of the time has been presented to us through channels of secondhand opinion«, and who are trying to understand America's early musical life increasingly through primary sources.3 Music scholars like Bill M alone have made new studies urgent by conceding that
the comparative research necessary for bold judgments about the survival of British music in America simply has not been done. We do not know enough about music and dance...