“Over the Waterfall” is an old-time fiddle tune known above all from Henry Reed (1884–1968) of Glen Lyn, Virginia. The folklorist and fiddler Alan Jabbour met Reed in 1966 and collected the tune from him in 1967. Reed told Jabbour that he first heard the melody at “Teet’s Show” in Peterstown, West Virginia, when he was five or six years old, which puts it around 1900; the show was a traveling entertainment of the kind that came through country towns. Jabbour’s band, the Hollow Rock String Band, put the tune on its 1968 LP Traditional Dance Tunes, and Jabbour played it at festivals; the Reed version is now very common among old-time fiddlers and is usually thought of as a beginner’s tune.
The melody is much older and wider than Reed. It is used for the British and American song best known as “Eggs and Marrowbones,” also called “The Old Woman from Wexford,” and as an instrumental in the British Isles and North America, as Jabbour pointed out. It also carried a comic song, “The Fellow That Looks Like Me” (alias “Punkin Head”), which Al Hopkins’s Hill Billies recorded in New York on 16 May 1927 as “The Feller That Looked Like Me” (Brunswick 184); the Galax-area fiddler Stuart Lundy also played the tune under that title. The Fiddler’s Companion notes a striking similarity to the Irish tune “The Dark Girl Dressed in Blue” in O’Neill’s Music of Ireland (1903), and says it is possible that the tune was adapted from an Irish tune; others have suggested it began as a composed piece from the turn of the twentieth century spread by traveling-circus and riverboat musicians.
In 1970 Jabbour collected a solo ballad from Maggie Hammons of West Virginia that uses the same melody, under the title “Mercian Titterary-Ary-A”; it appears on the Library of Congress album The Hammons Family. Pete Seeger later used the melody for his song about the damming of the Snake River, and the Kentucky fiddler J.P. Fraley plays a more melodically complicated version learned from his father.
