“Big Sciota,” also spelled “Big Scioty,” is a breakdown in G that is widely played in the old-time revival. It takes its name from the Scioto River, which runs through central and southern Ohio into the Ohio River at Portsmouth. The river’s own name comes from a Wyandot word for deer.
Nearly every version played today goes back to Burl Hammons, a fiddler from Marlinton in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. He belonged to a family known for its music, stories and woods lore. In the early 1970s a study of the family centred on three grandchildren of the patriarch Jesse Hammons: Maggie Hammons Parker, Sherman Hammons and Burl Hammons. It produced a Library of Congress double album in 1973, The Hammons Family, and a Rounder release. Collectors who recorded Burl at different times came away with different melodies. He may have played more than one version, or the tune may still have been changing in his hands. Those differences carried into the revival. The Red Clay Ramblers learned it from a 1970 field recording of Hammons made by Malcolm Owen, Blanton Owen and Bert Levy, and put it on their 1975 album Stolen Love. Other bands followed the recording Alan Jabbour collected for the Library of Congress set.
Jabbour, who knew Burl’s playing at first hand, said he “simply irregularly repeated phrases within the tune.” Burl did this in both the high and the low strain, and the phrase he tended to repeat was the third. The result, in Jabbour’s words, was “wonderfully crooked.” Players who learned from Hammons, directly or from tapes, spread the tune through the string-band revival of the 1970s. The Gypsy Gyppo String Band learned it from Burl by way of Jenny Cleland of the Highwoods Stringband. Their record came out in 1977, Ship in the Clouds recorded it for Folkways in 1978, and Bob Carlin set it for clawhammer banjo in 1979. A Kentucky relative is “Kentucky Winder,” played by John Salyer of Magoffin County.
