John Hartford's Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes is an intriguing and endearing collection of fiddle tunes composed by John Hartford (1937–2001), an old-time fiddler with Ozark roots but broad tastes, a country singer, and a progressive bluegrass musician. These are new melodies to be played by instrumentalists whose typical solo fare draws heavily on oral tradition. The collective flavor of Hartford's tunes is intended to match that of the old ones, or at least fit well into the same social and concert environments.

The three author/compilers bring complementary expertise to the project. Matt Combs, a prominent session musician (primarily a fiddler) based in Nashville, knew Hartford well and collaborated with him frequently; he wrote about their friendship and music-making in the book's brief foreword (xi–xii). Hartford's daughter Katie Harford Hogue (Hartford added the “t” to his surname at the suggestion of Chet Atkins) manages the John Hartford Office archive with her husband and her brother. She describes the project of extracting materials from “Dad's archive” (ix-x), which could have generated a much larger published collection since Hartford was as obsessive about writing thoughts and tunes down as he was energetic and eclectic within “folk” music. Greg Reish, who heads the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, is a bluegrass and old-time musician, record producer, librarian, and scholar of old-time music. In the book's formal introduction (1–19), Reish summarizes the purpose of the book: to tell “the story of John's lifelong love affair with the fiddle, its music, its people” related “through the memories of people who knew him and shared this love, through the thoughts and observations about fiddle music that John left behind and most importantly through the original tunes that he composed for the instrument” (2).

Hartford grew up in an upper-middle-class household in St. Louis in a family that encouraged his enthusiasm in music. He became a solid banjoist and fiddler in multiple styles; I find it interesting that, although he was a prime mover in the invention of “Newgrass,” his fiddle compositions eschew that style. He was gregarious offstage and on. He sometimes played in ensembles, but had special affinity for one-man-band performances combining fiddling with singing and/or dancing. In 1980, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He would live another twenty-one years but became very conscious that the clock was ticking. He worked harder on his music literacy and amplified his habit of writing all kinds of things down. He expressed himself in unpretentious miniatures—in prose as in music—in some sixty-eight numbered notebooks, on index cards, and on miscellaneous scraps of paper.

Most of this book is a mosaic of compact ingredients. While the focus is on the 176 original tunes, sixty of Hartford's single-line drawings are interspersed (he studied art at Washington University for four years), as are dozens of sentences or brief paragraphs of prose. Most of these are remembrances from his friends, but they also include other bits of biography and Hartford's own brief remarks concerning music or performing, often taking the form of admonitions addressed to himself: “Listen to the lyrics and become an actor in the play of the song” or “Dynamic Template[:] whisper, talk, scream, whisper” (inside back cover). The tunes are presented in photographs of Hartford's own reasonably-clear notations. These take up varying amounts of space, with the other small ingredients of the book inserted to efficiently fill each page. Along the way we are also treated to twenty-seven other photographs, primarily of Hartford with other musicians, that help to constitute a chronological panorama of interactions. The total effect is informal, friendly, and self-consciously rustic, though the book is a sturdy one printed on slick, strong paper. A common problem presents itself when the reader decides to play the tunes: how to keep a book with a stiff spine open. Music stand wires routinely deployed to keep folios of sheet music open are not strong enough, but the large type of elongated clothes pin made for band members performing outdoors in the wind do the trick.

The troika of editors gathered the tunes into ten “chapters,” each containing ten to twenty-five melodies. Hartford had noted each melody's date of composition, which suggested a simple way to organize this anthology; most of this book's chapters contain tunes written during a given year, starting with 1983 (chapter seven covers 1989–1990, and chapter ten a sparse final lineup of tunes from 1995 through 2000). Hartford meant to write fiddle tunes that would fit into the inherited repertoires, and they do fit broad norms. Each tune consists of two (rarely three) strains, each eight measures long (with substantial internal repetition), in contrasting tessituras. Nearly all melodies stay in first position, with idiomatic, easy fingering; very few pass from one string to another using the same finger. The tunes are in typical fiddle-friendly keys (G, D, A, C, plus a very few sports in F or different modes), although some of the tunes in the latter part of the collection are in mixtures of major and gapped scales, reflecting Hartford's developing avid study of West Virginia fiddler Ed Haley. Most are in simple duple time (hornpipes, reels, or “breakdowns”), plus a substantial minority of waltzes, a few rags, and a very few Irish-style jigs (in 6/8) or minstrel-style jigs (simple duple, often with a handful of short rests in rhythmically strong positions). Many of the tunes are routine in quality, and would fit into an evening of fiddle-accompanied dancing without sticking out in any way, but some are gems.

Hartford caught his stride as a composer of fiddle tunes in 1986. Two pages of melodies from that year (62–63) show him becoming increasingly ambitious in several ways. The titles are pungent: “Giving the Kitten Away,” “Here for Charlie,” and “Tennessee Politics” (set respectively in his favorite keys of G, A, and D). The name Charlie does not appear in many American fiddle tune titles; it is likely a gentle Scottish or Irish evocation, and the tune is rhythmically dense, mostly solid sixteenth notes with some prominent triplets pointing across the Atlantic. The other two tunes are more rhythmically varied and evoke song melodies, although not texted. Indeed, although just a half-dozen of these tunes have words, many of them bear lively titles that would reward elaboration in lyrics and have rhythms that strike me as consonant with the rhythms of the English language. For instance, “Old Beveled Mirror” (68) was labelled as a hornpipe by Hartford, but the note lengths seem right for a song; there are a number of repeated notes, and a few accidentals are interpolated to emphasize landing points—this tune feels like it ought to be a lugubrious ballad, one unabashedly wallowing in nostalgia.

A few of my favorite tunes in this anthology match especially well with their titles. “Go Home to Your Mother” insistently repeats a lick pounding on the tonic like a teacher, librarian, or friend's exasperated parent shaking their finger at a pesky kid (101). “The Road Leads Back to You,” one of very few among these tunes not in major (it's in A dorian), has a circular ending (153). And “Don't Hold Your Breath” has a lengthened first strain (156). Hartford's enduring love of rivers and river boats inspired his beautiful love song “Delta Queen Waltz” (66–67; Hartford gives a great performance currently available on YouTube). There are plenty of other endearing tunes in this collection. Fiddlers will enjoy choosing their own favorites to learn, and students of Hartford's era in Nashville will savor the nicely stacked array of anecdotes. But the best aspect of this book is how the ingredients of the package interact, how the tunes, drawings, photographs, and snippets of prose weave together in this warm portrait of John Hartford—kind man, sparkplug intellect, many-handed musician, and force of nature.