Old-Time TOTW

Old-Time TOTW #356 is Cold Frosty Morning from the playing of Melvin Playford Wine (20 April 1909--16 March 2003) of Copen, Braxton County, WV. He was the son of Robert "Bob" Lee Wine (1877-1953) and Mahala Elizabeth Sandy (1876-1956). He married Etta Azalea Singleton (1911-1992) on 1 December 1930. (source: Ancestry and public documents)

Wine came from a musical family. His father, Bob Wine, played the fiddle, and his mother, Elizabeth Sandy Wine, sang. Melvin’s brother Clarence played the banjo. Some of Melvin's earliest memories were lying in bed at night and listening to his father fiddling. This moved him to try to play himself. After he learned Bonaparte’s Retreat in secret on his own, his father began to teach him tunes that his own father and grandfather had taught him as a boy.

Wine also came to learn tunes from other area fiddlers. During the Depression, he sought out bars, restaurants and local radio stations to play with his brother Clarence. This only lasted a few months, but it was a good experience for the young men. During the 1980s and 1990s, Melvin played at concerts and festivals across the country. He also volunteered to play weekly for nursing home residents and other local fundraisers. Many of the tunes he learned from his father dated back to the early settlers of Appalachia.

Melvin was the first recipient of West Virginia's Vandalia Award, in 1981. The award is presented at the Vandalia Gathering which is sponsored by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History and held on the state Capitol grounds as "a free celebration of the arts, music, crafts, and food that reflect West Virginia's heritage."

In 1991, he was a recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

Article about Melvin Wine on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_...

Wine played “Cold Frosty Morning” in cross A (A,EAe), but as part of my project to discover tunes that might have been played in archaic tunings prior to our “source” fiddlers, I discovered this tune might have been played in calico tuning (A,EAc#). It certainly works well and makes a lot of sense in this tuning. I am tuned low in this video, F calico (F,CFA), which uses the same intervals of P5, P4, M3. This is not the same tune in A dorian played by Henry Reed that is often referred to by the same title, though the Reed tune is known as “Frosty Morning.” Mississippi fiddler Stephen Benjamin Tucker (1858-1945) played a very unusual, crooked jig by the same title, but it is in no way related to Wine’s “Cold Frosty Morning.”

Joining me is friend Morgan Sieg on fiddlesticks.

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