OLD TIME MUSIC MUSINGS

John Morgan Salyer and his half sisters Molly and Julia @ 1910 beside his barn on his farm at the head of the Birch Branch of the Burning Fork of the Licking River, Magoffin County, KY. John would have been 28, Molly 20, Julia 13.  John Morgan Salyer John Salyer was well know to me my whole life even though he died before I was born.  He was the father-in-law of my dad's eldest sister, Emma Marie Salyer.  My dad's mother, Maggie Patrick Isaac, talked about him a lot and loved to reminisce about dances she and Joh had played together long ago.  Mammie talked about how they would take all the furniture out of the house and put it on the front yard to make room for the dances. We spent a lot of time with Uncle Grover and Aunt Emma as I was growing up and so the stories of Fiddlin' John were burned in our memories.   The trip to the World's Fair in 1933 was a legend in our family that we never tired of hearing.  I also knew that John Salyer had a ...

The following was written by my Aunt Emma Ree and her husband, Grover Salyer many years ago for the Pioneer newspaper. "John Salyer and his two sons, Grover and Glen, were invited by the Sandy Valley Grocery Company to be entertainers on an excursion to the 1933 World's Fair at Chicago, Illinois. The train started picking up passengers in Pikeville, KY and continued to Cincinnati, Ohio. The father and son trio boarded the train early in the morning at Paintsville. Immediately they began making music from car to car. John played the fiddle, Grover the guitar, and Glen the mandolin. The playing continued until they arrived in Cincinnati. There they were joined by the Gibson Girl singers. From there to Chicago, they alternated singing and playing. The trip was uninterrupted until they stopped in Kankakee, Illinois to switch engines. The next stop was Chicago about 10:30 at night.  In Chicago they were greeted by a bag-pipe band. Most of the passengers had never heard bag-pipe...

This fiddle is thought to be the fiddle from J.M. Salyer's childhood, although there is no proof.  A homemade fiddle was given to John Salyer after he broke his leg as a small boy and had to spend many months in bed, this may have been about 1890.  The story goes that this was when he learned to play the fiddle.  It appears that the neck and scroll was machine made and the body of the fiddle was homemade by someone probably there in Kentucky. Originally I was not going to have the homemade fiddle restored, I was just going to hang it on the wall.  I took it to Lafayette just for Anya to see.  After spending time with her, I decided to see if she could make this fiddle playable too.  Well, she did and it sounds amazingly good!  Here are the before and after photos and a video of Anya playing the homemade fiddle. The before picture After Anya worked on the fiddle. The fiddle has a string tied to the sound post to help position t...

The John Salyer fiddle probably isn't worth a lot of money, but it is a valuable part of the history of old-time music, so I decided it's restoration should have extra special care.  I reached out to the Old-Time Fiddlers group on Facebook and got lots of suggestions.  Suzy Thompson suggested Anya Burgess at SoLa in Lafayette, and Suzy said, "Good excuse to have a trip to Lafayette".  The more I researched Anya, the more I became convinced she was the best choice.  I learned that Anya  after growing up just outside Boston, Massachusetts, completed a violin-making program at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.  She then worked with a luthier in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.  After talking to Anya on the phone, I knew a trip to  Lafayette was in our future. In Lafayette I was expecting a dusty backyard violin repair shop but instead found the beautiful storefront on SoLa in downtown Lafayette.  Anya opened up the fiddle and let me look in...

Recently I was lucky enough to be made the custodian of two fiddles that came from John Morgan Salyer's  son, Grover.  They are believed to have belonged to J.M. Salyer but there is no proof of that.    My sister Maggie Helton was kind enough to pass them on to me and deliver them to Texas.  One fiddle is supposed to be the one JMS learned to play on.  When he was 8 years old he broke his leg and spent close to a year bed bound and someone (I never heard who) made him a homemade fiddle.  The second fiddle is the one that is reputed to be the fiddle that he took to Chicago to the World's Fair in 1934.   Next step - restoration. The homemade JMS fiddle. The homemade JMS fiddle. John Morgan Salyer during the Spanish American War The later fiddle