"Jenny Get Around" - Ben Kiser

Here's "Jenny Get Around," from John Salyer (1882 - 1952) of Magoffin County, Kentucky. This is one of Salyer's better known tunes, played at Wild Goose Christian Community September 24, 2023.
Fiddle tuning is (G# D# G# D#)
John Morgan Salyer was born and lived in Salyersville, a town named after his Grandfather, Samuel Salyer (b. 1812). A farmer all of his life, John Salyer was heir to an important local musical tradition carried by his father and many other relatives and neighbors. Patrick Risner (b. 1857) is the oldest known local source of this tradition. John's fiddling was heavily influenced by Willie Fletcher (b. 1871). He learned many tunes from Fletcher and said him to be "the sweetest and smoothest fiddler I ever heard."
Salyer's son Grover recalled "He [John Salyer] played for a lot of dances...I've seen him...playing for a hoedown dace and he'd jump up and dance and play the fiddle at the same time."
Another fiddler friend of John's was William H. Stepp (1875 - 1957). Several tunes that Salyer and Stepp played in common are remarkably similar. Salyer's son Glen said of Stepp, "I liked to hear him play, He was considered a good fiddler, and he was. He loved to entertain people...more than Dad did."
Along with his two sons, Grover (1910-1994) and Glen (1914-2003), on guitar and mandolin, respectively, Salyer was invited by the Sandy Valley Grocery Company to be entertainers at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago. The train started to pick up passengers in Pikeville, KY and continued to Cincinnati, OH. Salyer and his sons provided music on the train. The playing continued until they arrived in Cincinnati. There they were joined by the Gibson Girl singers, and from there to Chicago, they alternated singing and playing. When they arrived in Chicago at 10:30pm, they were greeted by a bagpipe band. They stayed at the Stevenson Hotel. The second night the Salyers were invited to play for a dance in the million dollar ballroom of the Knickerbocker Hotel. The dance floor was make of glass blocks with many colored lights in it. There were 6,500 people in attendance, and they wanted a variety of dance music. John and his sons played the music they knew and encouraged people to dance however they wanted to it.
It was the spring of 1934. John Salyer was out plowing his cornfield when a record company scout approached him with a contract in his hands. The story of their encounter, passed down in the Salyer family, goes something like this.
The scout had heard Salyer fiddle the previous fall at the Worlds Fair in Chicago and wanted to sign him up. "How much is in it for me?" Salyer asked. A small percent, he was told. "Why so little?" The company man explained all the expenses involved in making the recording and selling them, and Salyer grew increasingly impatient. "Now let me ask you this," Salyer said. "I realize there's a lot that goes into the record business, but can you make these records without the old-time fiddlers?" "No" the scout admitted. "Well then" said John, "I think a fifty-fifty split would be about right." The company man said that would be impossible. "Get up, Kate," John said to his horse, "we can make more money plowing than making records!"
Convinced that record companies exploited old-time fiddlers for profit, Salyer never did make commercial recordings, but Glen and Grover did convince him to record many of his tunes at home in 1941-42. He was reluctant, but his sons convinced him to do it. At one point, in frustration over not recalling part of a tune, he threw his fiddle down on the bed and refused to record any more, but Glen and Grover convinced him to continue. These recordings reveal a powerful breakdown fiddler with great skill and a repertoire of magnificent old-time tunes, many of them extremely rare.
"Well, it took a little while, but I did track down Grover Salyer, and through the Salyer family and those recordings, I was able to learn and archive a great many of those old eastern Kentucky pieces."
Bruce Greene

[@bteplik]

Beautifully done. 👏👏👏

[@maxraabe5745]

❤️💃💃🔥🎉

[@conradb209]

Funny. I used to work with a guy named Ken Beiser. Nice playing. Thanks for giving the tuning. I would have gone crazy trying to play it in standard tuning.