In 1883, the following was published: In 1995 Mel Bay reprinted the collection under the same title, showing Patrick Sky*** as the author. You can find it on Amazon for about $25 - $30, or maybe direct from Mel Bay using the discount code they give us MC-folks periodically in our Classified section. Also, books.google.com, has a pdf version available for $9.99. Or, you can Google "Ryan's Mammoth Collection" and eventually find a free pdf of the original 1883 publication which is public domain material at this point. The Mel Bay re-publication is interesting primarily for Pat Sky's research on the world of music publishing in the 19th century and biographical sketches of Elias Howe (the publisher) and William Bradbury Ryan (who collected the tunes). That evaluation is admittedly unfair because I have not read the textual material in that publication except for the excerpt available at Google Books. Anyway. The book is a goldmine of 19th century fiddle tunes. Many (most, actually) are tunes I am not familiar with, at least not with their titles. But when I am bored with my current tune or exercise, it is fun to open it at random and just try to play a few tunes. One neat thing is that the publication includes bowing and fingering suggestions for the violin. If you follow them, you will get a pinkie workout as the transcriber follows the violinist's philosophy of avoiding open notes.
I forgot the footnote. So here it is: *** Patrick Sky? Really? Blast from the past. I saw him in a very un-PC (for the time and locale) coffeeshop just off the campus of Virginia Tech back in the mid-1960's. Bought his LP. Probably still have it somewhere. I remember two tunes from it: "Drunken Ira Hayes" and "The Wreck of the Old 97". The few times since that I have actually thought of him were like "I wonder if he is still alive, 'cause he couldn't have survived long on what he earned at that coffee shop." The locale was called "Books Strings and Things", the proprietor was Dick somebody, and he sold me the Ode banjo I still have, probably to raise capital for inventory or coffee cups or just to pay the rent. Wow.
There's nothing more fun for me than taking a big fat tune collection and digging into it. My copy, however, has painfully small font and a lot crammed on a page. I wonder if the pdf is more user friendly. I'll have to check it out. Nigel Gatherer has on his website some annotations of the collection cross referencing tune titles. If the title is unknown to you but the notes sound suspiciously familiar, you might recognize it by another name. Fun to hear your reminiscence.
The pdf is great for me because I have a big monitor and I can zoom it to whatever I want in magnification.
