The oldest recognized recording of an autoharp was made in New York City in September 1924, for a 78 RPM disc that was never released. It was re-recorded in January of the following year and distributed a few months later. On each side, Ernest V. Stoneman alternates between the vocal rendition of a song and playing it on a harmonica, accompanying himself on an autoharp throughout.
This disc has the additional distinction of being the first recording of country music to attain hit status. Some estimates judge it to have sold over a million copies within a year after its release. This called widespread popular attention to Stoneman’s pairing of the autoharp and mouthharp, as well as setting a precedent for the subsequent use of that combination, exemplified below.
The development of the autoharp as a melody instrument is also examined here. As described in the US patent issued for it in 1882, “the instrument may be used for accompaniment to the voice or another musical instrument, or the melody may be played at the same time with the accompaniment, as on any other harp.” Lesser known early recordings of the autoharp in melodic use are presented, along with more recent ones.
Stoneman acquired the nickname “Pop” when he began appearing with The Stoneman Family in the 1950s. His daughter, Donna played the mandolin in that group, often at its front. A photo album flashes by without comment in a filmed interview with her. It is opened to a photo captioned “1890 — The First Stoneman Family,” reproduced as this post’s banner image.
In the liner notes to his anthology Masters of Old-Time Country Autoharp, released in 2006, Mike Seeger makes an observation about “the picking of simple melodies on single strings, alternating with chords, that Pop Stoneman demonstrated for me as being his grandmother Bowers’s [autoharp] style.” The 1870 US Census records Stoneman’s mother, Rebecca (née Bowers), as being two years old, and her own mother, Caroline, as 25. It is conceivable that either of them might be the autoharp player in the 1890 photo.
Rebecca Stoneman died in 1897, when Ernest was three years old. Three of his male cousins in the Lundy branch of the family assisted in his upbringing, particularly with its musical facet. The supposition that the fiddler standing at the right of the photo might be Emmett Lundy, born in 1864 and a renowned performer in his own right, is consistent with later photos. The family resemblance in the 1890 photo suggests that Stoneman’s other cousins may appear in it.
Stoneman initially used the autoharp for accompaniment with a basic rhythmic pattern where the root of a given chord is plucked alternately with the strummed full chord. This is heard on the 1925 recording, both on the A-side The Face that Never Returned, and the B-side The Titanic that vaunted the disc to fame.
This rhythmic device is commonly varied by halving one or both of the strokes into a separate upstroke and downstroke. I can’t quite make out if Stoneman uses the extended form fleetingly near the end of the preceding recording, but he does so unambiguously in the instrumental breaks on All I’ve Got’s Gone. This was another of his recordings for autoharp, mouthharp, and voice issued in close succession in 1925.
Yet another of them is purely instrumental, with Emmett Lundy on the fiddle. The B-side performance of Piney Woods Girl is generally associated with Lundy. In discussions of it, Stoneman is treated as subservient to him, providing an accompaniment on the harmonica, with no heed taken of the autoharp. Nevertheless, in this tune Stoneman shifts between playing accompaniment and melody on that very instrument. (On the A-side recording of The Long Eared Mule all three instruments play the melody together, with none in an accompanying role.)
This tune moves with a rhythmic drive that is a mainstay of old-time instrumental performance. The fiddler Eck Robinson provides a quintessential demonstration of it on the first known commercial recording of country music, also made in New York City, on a disc released on 1 September 1922. The A-side Sallie Gooden, was recorded on 1 July of that year. Robinson maintains a relentless pulse, also using the fiddle’s A-string as a drone, and evoking a stylistic commonality with old-time banjo playing (and displaying impressive facility with the variation of the tune).
Jonah Easter approaches the autoharp in a similar manner in the instrumental breaks on a recording of the Roving Gambler made in August 1937.
Seeger comments on this recording in the liner notes cited above but does not include it on the anthology disc. He says nothing about Stoneman’s melodic autoharp playing in 1925, either. (I needed to listen carefully and repeatedly with varied equalizer settings and speed shifts before deciding that he was actually was doing so.) The anthology is otherwise a rich sampler of old-time melodic autoharp playing. The first cut on it is a re-recording of Stoney’s Waltz, first made by Stoneman in 1957, with no ambiguity in what he is doing with the instrument.
Crossing the Atlantic to the realms of Irish and Scottish traditional music, the earliest known recordings of the autoharp there were made in Glasgow in November 1930. On one of them, The Call of the Pipes Part 2, the player of the mouthharp — Scots moothie — Jimmy Hiddlestone is accompanied by an ensemble including an autoharp player identified only by the family name MacFarlane.
Their pairing of the two harps can easily have been inspired by Stoneman. However, on the Scottish recordings the autoharp is played in a manner utterly different from American old-time style. MacFarlane begins by emulating bagpipe drones with strummed open fifths. This requires the simultaneous lowering of two chord bars or one customized expressly for the purpose, either way being the first recorded manifestation of such techniques.
There are chord changes in the accompaniment but the overriding musical function of the autoharp is to provide a strong percussive effect. The excruciating placement of the microphone can conceivably be a deliberate attempt at highlighting this. Hiddlestone and MacFarlane recorded several other tracks where the mouthharp plays melody and the autoharp supports it as a percussion instrument. These are collated in a larger sampler of the Scottish mouthharp playing of the day. Their contributions include the following Medley of Irish Jigs. (I’ll be discussing current melodic use of the autoharp for Scottish tunes in a separate post.)
A similar sampler of far more recent recordings made by the autoharp player, Lindsay Haisley, is found on his website. It includes a track from the album (Auto) Harps Alive!!, produced by the late Bob Gibson, and recorded in Chicago in 1986. Haisley demonstrates the melodic capability of a chromatic autoharp, together with the diatonic mouthharp virtuoso Howard Levy, in an instrumental rendition of a song in another American genre — Sweet Georgia Brown — composed in the same year that Stoneman recorded his hit single.
Chicago is also where the first recordings of traditional Irish dance tunes were made, during the first decade of the 20th century. An earlier post titled The Connemara Fiddle discusses two specific wax cylinders where a mandolin and fiddle share the recording horn with a fife. The original cylinders found their way to Ireland, along a vibrant path of musical exchange between the two countries.
Another post, about the Autoharp in Irish Traditional Music, discusses the recorded appearance of the instrument in that country, in a chronology that extends to the work of the late Chris Twomey. He was the first Irish musician to record on the autoharp melodically, playing both American old-time music and the traditional music of his homeland. He took up the instrument in 1967 and a CD with “the essential autoharp recordings of Chris Twomey,” was released in 2004.
The post linked to in the paragraph above and yet another earlier post, about Irish music on double-strung instruments, each contain an excerpt from one of the three Irish tunes on that CD. For the sake of completeness, a snippet from the remaining track follows. On it Twomey uses a diatonic autoharp to play Fanny Power, composed by the famed Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan.
This segues into my hobbyhorse interests in the idiomatic ornamentation of traditional Irish dance tunes, and whether the autoharp is capable of doing so convincingly. Beyond the ornamentation itself, which I believe lies within the autoharp’s technical capability, is the more fundamental matter of rhythmic effect. This is not instrument specific, and the aspiring Irish-style autoharper can take guidance from established practice on other instruments.
The post cited two paragraphs above takes the mandolin as a role model, and the fiddle and Irish harp have figured similarly in others. What are often taken to be categorical rhythmic differences between American-style and Irish-style rendition, are not always quite so clear cut. I’m going to wrap up this outing with another performance by Lundy, which demonstrates the rhythmic breadth of old-time performance.
He played 34 tunes for a field recording organized by the Library of Congress at his home in 1941. Almost all of them are in a style one might expect for the native performance of American fiddle tunes. However, one of them — Jackson’s March — departs notably from that pattern.
Lundy plays it with a marked rhythmic swing, matching that characteristic of Irish-style performance. This can be purely coincidental, with my being struck by it indicating the limit of my understanding of the matter. However, the tune itself may shed further light on the possibility of Lundy knowingly having tossed an Irish tune into the 1941 session.
APPENDIX
Jackson’s March can be traced back to the poem Stonewall Jackson’s Way, written during the American Civil War. It was set to music anonymously in 1862 in a version that bears no melodic resemblance to Lundy’s recording. In 1863, Charles Young based a more elaborate piano composition on the same poem, titled Stonewall Jackson’s Grand March…illustrative of “Stonewall Jackson’s Way.”
The initial melody in it is the same as the A-part of Lundy’s setting. However, his B-part is not found in Young’s piece. There is no pressing need for tracking down its source. Lundy can simply have crafted it to his own liking, assuming that he wasn’t playing an older tune, from which Young can have taken the A-part melody.
Stepping more fully into speculative analysis, as Lundy played it, Jackson’s March strongly resembles the work of the 18th-century Irish fiddler and piper Walker Jackson. Dozens of his tunes entered into the traditional Irish repertoire with names in the form, Jackson’s [something]. The most straightforward of them is Jackson’s Jig, often referred to simple as Jackson’s, and the best know is Jackson’s Morning Brush.
The monumentally significant Sligo fiddle player, Michael Coleman, settled in New York City in 1917. He made commercial recordings of both tunes there: Jackson’s Morning Brush for Vocalion Records in 1921, and Jackson’s Jig for Columbia Records in 1925. He also recorded on the Okeh label in 1922.
However brief Emmett’s own visit to the Okeh studio in 1925 may have been, it is difficult to imagine that there was no mention of the famous fiddler who had preceded him there. Coleman was still at the height of his career and residing in New York City at the time, so the two may even have met. Regardless of how correct this suggestion might be, between Emmett’s NYC recording session and the one for the Library of Congress over a decade and a half later, the breadth of his repertoire would surely have expanded. The extent to which that entailed increased familiarity with traditional Irish fiddling remains a matter of conjecture.