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...