“Mississippi Sawyer” is an American fiddle breakdown in two parts, usually played in D major, and its origins go back at least to the early nineteenth century. One of the earliest printings of the melody is in George P. Knauff’s Virginia Reels (Baltimore, 1839), where it is titled “Love from the Heart.” Knauff printed a piece called “Mississippi Sawyer” in another volume of the series, but it is an unrelated tune. Older fiddlers often called this one “The Downfall of Paris,” and under that title it was recorded for the Library of Congress in 1939 from John Hatcher in Tishomingo County, Mississippi.
The folklorist Charles Wolfe explained the title through the river trade. To boatmen, a sawyer was an uprooted tree whose roots had caught in the bed of the river, so that the current made the trunk bob up and sometimes break the surface in front of a passing boat. On the Mississippi, government snag boats patrolled to clear them. Ira Ford, in Traditional Music in America (1940), gave a different story he had collected: the tune was credited to an early sawmill owner near the meeting of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, a local character known as “the Mississippi Sawyer,” who played it for the dance that celebrated his mill’s first run.
It was one of the set tunes at an 1899 fiddle contest in Gallatin, Tennessee, where each contestant played his own version. Emmett Lundy of Galax, Virginia, thought few fiddlers played all of it properly, and he faulted those who slid up with the third finger instead of reaching with the fourth.
Don Richardson recorded it as a violin solo with piano for Columbia in New York on 5 May 1916. Whitter’s Virginia Breakdowners (James Sutphin on fiddle, John Rector on banjo, Henry Whitter on guitar) cut it for OKeh in 1924, and the Hill Billies recorded it for Brunswick in 1926. Earl Johnson and his Clodhoppers recorded it for OKeh in 1927 as “Mississippi Jubilee.” In 1929 came the Kessinger Brothers’ fiddle-and-guitar version, which Brunswick also issued in Quebec as “Le Reel Gaspesien,” and the Skillet Lickers’ Atlanta session for Columbia, with three fiddles, banjo and guitar. Gus Meade counted 23 early commercial sides of the tune. Among much later recordings, Norman Blake and Red Rector made one in 1976 for their County album, with Charlie Collins on guitar and Roy Huskey Jr. on bass.
