“Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom” is an old-time fiddle tune from the country along the Kentucky–West Virginia line, usually played in G Dorian. Older recordings call it simply “Blackberry Blossom.” The Garfield name, which the Fiddler’s Companion suggests may have come from John Hartford, sets it apart from the Arthur Smith tune of the same name.
It was the signature tune of Ed Haley, a blind professional fiddler. Haley was born on Harts Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, and died in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1951. He seldom recorded commercially, but late in life he made records for his family on a Wilcox-Gay disc-cutting machine that his stepson Ralph had brought home from the service. Some of those discs were later issued by Rounder, and Haley’s “Blackberry Blossom” is on the Rounder set Grey Eagle. Hartford spent his last years researching Haley and recorded the tune on The Speed of the Old Long Bow: A Tribute to Ed Haley (Rounder, 1998).
An early commercial recording came from Dick Burnett, a Kentucky musician, with Oscar Ruttledge on guitar. It was cut in Atlanta on 19 April 1930 and issued as “Blackberry Blossoms” on Columbia 15567-D, backed with “Sleeping Lulu.” Burnett gave two accounts of where he learned it: once that he had it directly from “a blind fiddler … named Ed Haley,” and elsewhere that he learned it from the fiddler Bob Johnson, who had it from Haley.
The Garfield story appears in Jean Thomas’s book Ballad Makin’ in the Mountains of Kentucky. General Garfield heard a soldier play the tune on the harmonica, said it was his favourite but could not recall its name, and spat tobacco juice onto a white blackberry blossom, which gave the tune its title. In June 1934, at Thomas’s American Folk Song Festival in Ashland, she recorded the fiddler Ed Morrison playing it for the Library of Congress. Morrison held that Garfield often whistled the tune and that his own harmonica-playing father had learned it from the general as a boy. Garfield did campaign in that country: in December 1861 he led his brigade out of Catlettsburg, next to Ashland, up the Big Sandy valley. After the Battle of Middle Creek he was promoted to brigadier general. The Fiddler’s Companion still calls the story improbable.
Betty Vornbrock and others have noted its likeness to the West Virginia tune “Yew Piney Mountain.” Kentucky fiddlers J. P. Fraley and Santford Kelly play it, and Buddy Thomas and Owen “Snake” Chapman recorded it. The Nashville Bluegrass Band opened Twenty Year Blues (Sugar Hill, 2004) with it.
