Tommy Jarrell: An Old-Time Master

(b. March 1, 1901–d. Jan. 28, 1985)

Thomas Jefferson Jarrell was born and raised in the Round Peak area of Surry County, North Carolina, the first child of Susan and Ben Jarrell, his father, a noted fiddler. Everyone called him Tommy. A principled man, he was curious, garrulous, and generous.

When Tommy was an eight-years-old, the family hired a man to help out on the farm, 'Boggy' Cockerham. Boggy turned out to be a clawhammer banjo player, so Tommy took up the banjo (1909).

Then, at age 13, after watching his father, his Uncle Charlie, and other neighbors playing, Tommy took up fiddle. By age sixteen, Tommy was playing for dances in the Round Peak area.

My First Fiddle Lesson

I first visited Tommy in the early spring of 1972, traveling with Odell McGuire. We drove down from Lexington, VA to Toast, NC near Mt. Airy.

I'd been playing the fiddle for six weeks.

Earlier that winter, I'd borrowed Chris Murray's fiddle during a break in an Old-Time session and took it out into the backyard. I wanted a few moments to experiment with the instrument alone.

I played guitar with old-time, built and played my banjo, but the fiddle seemed to be where it was at.

I stood in the backyard and tucked the fiddle up under my chin. At first, I just plucked the strings and hunted for a major scale.

Chris had been playing in open-A tuning (A-E-A-E, instead of standard G-D-A-E, low to high). I took the bow in hand and awkwardly pulled it across the strings. Drones! I played the open strings, then a couple of fretted notes, fine-tuning the pitches. Everything about the instrument seemed foreign.  

I tried to bow two strings together. I had Uncle Bunt Steven's Sail Away Ladies in my head and after about ten minutes of searching for it, a portion of the tune began to take shape in the air around me. "I could play one of these," I thought and went back inside, thanked Chris, and determined to find a fiddle of my own.

I did find a fiddle for around a hundred bucks, bow in the case. When we traveled down to see Tommy in North Carolina, I had spent nearly every waking hour of the previous six weeks, struggling to get a fiddle tune or two to come out of the damned thing. I think I had three tunes I could coax into being with my banjo playing former Geology professor Odell McGuire's sustained encouragement.

To set up our visit with Tommy, Odell had simply called him on the phone, expressed our admiration and interest in learning more about his music. Could we come for a visit? Tommy said, "Sure. When?" They set a date.

We drove down on a Friday after classes.

When we got to Tommy's house, we walked up the little concrete steps and Tommy met us at the door. Holding the screen door open for us he said, "Come in. Come in!"

We shook hands and set our instruments down. Then Tommy said,

"So good of your boys to come. Play me something."

The blood in my veins ran a little cold. Six weeks.

"Tommy," I said, "that's not exactly why we came."

"No, no, you play me something first," Tommy said.

I looked at Odell, who shrugged his shoulders and began to get out his banjo. I got my fiddle, rosined up the bow (for a little too long), and Odell and I crashed or limped through one of my three tunes. I'm sure it was terrible.

"Now, that's purt' good, that's purt' good," Tommy said. And then turning to me he said, "But your bowings all backards."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, it's going up when it ought to be going down, and down when it ought to be going up."

"Show me," I said.

Tommy was a formidable musician, storyteller, and performer, and an amazing teacher. He tucked his fiddle under his chin and started to explain how the bow worked, and why he bowed the way he bowed (and why my bowing was, in fact, backwards).

Tommy explained and demonstrated that the weight of the bow suspended above where it contacted the string helped the strength of the attack: downbeat, down bow.

He then showed me how he adjusted his bowing to get the strong downbow strokes where he wanted them, re-articulating notes to create a dance rhythm–but also to arrange his bow strokes the way he wanted them.

When anyone untutored picks up an instrument, they will try the easiest way to begin. The easiest bow direction is up: you rest the tip of the bow on the string and push. Downbows are trickier and harder to master, so nearly all new fiddlers begin with upbows.

Tommy opened a new world for me. It was a masterful lesson. Tommy knew what he was doing, why he was doing it, and could break it down and carefully explain it. My first fiddle lesson was with a master.

Following our weekend with Tommy, I went home and reversed the bowings for those three tunes. I can assure you that unlearning something is far more difficult than learning it.

Our brains don't break bad habits. The brain doesn't break connections–it makes connections. There's nothing for it but to carefully and mindfully make a new habit and forbid any errant neurons to follow their previous path.

Eventually, the untraveled neural pathway will go dark, weeds will grow up through the cracked pavement, and after a while no self-respecting neuron would be caught dead wandering down that way–afraid it will get mugged. Unused, the brain will then recycle that neural geography for something else.

It took forever to redo the bowings, but it was the first–and in many ways–the most telling and important lesson I had.

Friday night to Saturday morning

Tommy played music with us, generously offered us pointers, and told jokes and stories late into the night. We drank a fair amount of Rebel Yell–Odell's whisky of choice at the time–before we rolled our sleeping bags out and prepared to get some rest.

Odell took the couch, which was just long enough for him. As I looked around for a place out of the way (hoping not to be trod on in the dark when someone got up in the night to pee), I settled on the little alcove just off the kitchen, where Tommy's washer and dryer were. It was narrow, but long enough. I rolled my bag out there.

As we all got settled and said goodnight, I lay back, head-in, feet near the kitchen. It was tight, but I was twenty (and this was, like, sixty pounds ago...).

When my hip and shoulder got tired of the floor, I tried to roll over and discovered the space between the wall and the washing machine was too narrow for my shoulders to clear it. I had to actually stand up, turn, and then lay back down on my other side.

It was a very long night. I was up to switch sides about every hour. Morning's arrival was a relief.

Whisky Before Breakfast

A little before six a.m., Tommy appeared in the kitchen, turned on the oven, and put a plate of biscuits in it that his daughter had brought over. He had bacon and eggs out, too. A pot of coffee was starting to percolate on the stovetop.

Tommy wandered over to where I was lying and gave my feet a little tap with his shoe. I roused myself, grateful to be able to get up. My joints hurt.

I sat up and Tommy handed me a tumbler half full of a clear liquid.

"Have some of this. It'll help," Tommy said.

I reached for the glass, I had a sniff, "What is it?"

"Sour mash Rye."

Tommy had moonshined in three different states before he married and settled down to run a motor grader for the NC Highway Department, work he did for thirty years. In the world of moonshine, Tommy still knew who the artists were.

I cautiously took a little sip.

That was the smoothest whisky I had ever had, but a little sip before six a.m. was plenty. Wow. Though clear as water, it wasn't until I crossed paths with the single malts and unblended Irish whiskies that I had its equal.

Tommy talked about doubling back–cleaning out the still and running the first run again to take out the impurities–making the whisky smoother and easier to drink.

Holding The Bead

Tommy talked about a whisky 'holding the bead'–a moonshiner's test of its potency. He took hold of the closed bottle of shine and banged it hard into the palm of his hand three times. The surface of the moonshine was covered with large and small bubbles which pulled off to the side of the bottle. The larger bubbles held onto the inside of the bottle for a few seconds before they broke and disappeared.

"That's holding the bead," Tommy said.

"If they hold like that, the whisky is over 100 proof. If they pull off and just disappear, then it's under.

If it holds the bead, it might be 100, 140, or 180 proof, no telling, but it won't hold the bead if it's under 100."

Try it yourself. You'll see.

Breakfast

We had a big country breakfast with Tommy wielding the spatula, pointing to coffee cups and holding forth.

As I was helping wash up, Odell took a tour of the family photographs on the walls of the little sitting room. In one, he found a faded North Carolina Highway Department check for several hundred dollars, made out to Thomas Jefferson Jarrell.

"Tommy," Odell asked, "What's the story behind this check?"

"My wife liked to kill me," Tommy said. "She wouldn't talk to me for weeks."

Seniority Pay: The NC Highway Department

"I guess," Tommy began, "I'd been working at the Highway Department for about twenty years when I noticed that some of the other men on the crew, men who'd been there just a year or two, had a little number–fifteen or twenty-some bucks–in a box on their pay stub, a box that had always been empty on mine.

"I went to my supervisor and asked him about it."

"That's seniority pay, Tommy. You ain't been getting that? All these years? That's just not right. And I'm going to get to the bottom of it and get you the money you deserve."

"Months went by–maybe six months–then one day the supervisor called me into his office.

"Well, Tommy, it took a long time, but I got your money," and handed Tommy a check for a couple hundred dollars.

Tommy cocked his eye at us, looking a bit sideways over his glasses.

"Those other boys was getting $20 or $30 every two weeks for years. And I got nothing. I looked down at that check and I knew they was robbing me. It should have been thousands, not hundreds."

"This doesn't seem like enough."

"Oh, no, Tommy that's it. And there will be something in seniority box every pay period from now on."

Tommy took the check home, but refused to cash it. His wife was furious. They needed the money. Tommy tucked that check in the picture frame and it was still there when she died, there when we visited him.

"If I cashed that check," Tommy said, "that would be the end of it. They robbed Tommy Jarrell and no one would ever be the wiser. But someday, an auditor will wonder why this check was never cashed, and they'll look into it and find out how they mistreated me. I may be dead by then, but someone will know they robbed Tommy Jarrell.

You may tramp down the flowers all around my grave,
But they will rise and bloom again, little girl,
They'll rise and bloom again

One Handshake Away from the Civil War

Tommy was playing dances by the time he was sixteen (1917). Returning home late, walking in the middle of a moonlit road, keeping an eye out for snakes that come out onto the pavement to warm up in the early spring and late fall, Tommy came up on a cadaverous old man standing in the road. As Tommy approached him, the man spoke.

"What you got in the pillowcase, son?"

"A fiddle."

"Oh, a fiddle. May I see it?" the man asked.

Tommy was raised to be polite to his elders, known and unknown, and he carefully took the fiddle and bow out of the pillowcase and handed it to the old man.

This was "Old Man Pet" McKinny, a Civil War veteran, seen from today's vantage point, forty years out of combat, he was obviously suffering from PTSD, wandering the road alone, unable to sleep. He gently received the fiddle from Tommy and thanked him.

McKinny tuned it up and played a tune, Sail Away Ladies. Then he started to give the fiddle back.

Tommy said, "That's a mighty nice tune. Would you play that again?" And Tommy learned the tune there in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night.

Around the same time, Tommy met another Civil War vet, Zach Payne near Lambsburg. He went up to Zach's to learn his version of "Billy In The Low Ground," but instead came away with two more Civil War era tunes, "Devil in The Straw Stacks" and "Flatwoods" (which is played with the first string dropped down to a D, in an altered tuning G-D-A-D).

Flatwoods was a small community where some Confederate deserters were reportedly hanged during the war by the home guard. Tommy didn't know anything about its origin other than it was old, and it came from Zach.

Handed Knowledge

This is handed music. There are skills and ways of using one's hands that are passed personally from one fiddler to another. Tommy preserved and extended the fiddle and banjo traditions of the Round Peak area, specializing in music that was made in the couple of generations before 1925.

In addition to those sources, Tommy learned music from a black neighbor, who used to play guitar quietly to himself as he was coming home from a juke joint on the black side of town.

Tommy's room faced out over the street and he heard this fellow, walking home numerous times, playing a blues tune about two moonshiners, Riley & Spencer.

Tommy carried that song around in his head until he figured out how to play it in an Old-Time style, retaining the sliding and bending of the blue notes.

He also once attended a traveling tent show where "a little yellow gal" (a mulatto) sang Boll Weevil. Tommy said he paid for one show and snuck into two more to hear her sing it and learn it. He eventually moved Boll Weevil into his repertoire, too.

Over several visits, I learned those Civil War tunes from Tommy, from his hands in his living room–one of some dozens of young fiddlers who were lucky enough to do the same. That makes us one handshake away from the Civil War. Tommy’s hand.

Tommy was a living bridge between a forgotten time before he was born right up into the 1970s and 80s. He could play tunes the way his father and family played them back in the day, and then turn right around and play you his version, to which he had often added a highly syncopated and chordal part: Backstep Cindy and what he called his father's Old-Time Sally Ann come to mind.

Tommy Jarrell was a consummate musician and a living archive. In addition to welcoming musicians into his home, Tommy made cassette tapes for people, recorded albums, and participated in films about his life and music.

One of the films, Les Blank's Sprout Wings and Fly, won awards, was translated into Spanish, and played at international film festivals in Scotland, Spain, and South America.

In 1984, the summer before he died, Tommy made another album of previously unrecorded material, Rainbow Sign. You will find lots of YouTube.com videos of Tommy's music and playing. He was a titanic man. You'll see why we miss him so.

Tommy held onto the fiddle like he had a rattlesnake by the head (and may well have had rattlesnake buttons in his fiddle (rumored to be good luck to put in and bad luck to take out). He played with fire and precision on banjo and fiddle, and was a fine, emotional singer.

In early 1985, the news of Tommy’s death came over the public radio station, WUNC in Chapel Hill. I was preparing for the coming of my second son. The world stopped.

I got my fiddle out and began to play. Just as he would have hoped.

May the gods smile on him, wherever he is.

Thanks for being here,

Scott Ainslie

https://Patreon.com/ScottAinslie

https://CattailMusic.com