“Tennessee Politics” is a reel by John Hartford, one of more than 2,000 original fiddle tunes found in his archive after his death in 2001. They were written in sixty-eight music notebooks, composed during the last eighteen years of his life. His daughter Katie Harford Hogue came across the notebooks, and the fiddler Matt Combs went through them one by one, choosing 176 fiddle tunes that he judged a real representation of Hartford and his style; only 13 of them had ever been recorded or published by Hartford himself.
Those 176 tunes were gathered in John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes, compiled and narrated by Combs, Hogue and the musicologist Greg Reish (StuffWorks Press, 2018), which reproduces Hartford’s pencil manuscripts along with interviews and drawings. To put the tunes into play, Combs and Hogue made The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, Volume 1, released in March 2020, with musicians including Sierra Hull, Noam Pikelny, Chris Eldridge and Dennis Crouch.
“Tennessee Politics” opens that album and was its first single. Combs plays fiddle, with Ronnie McCoury on mandolin, Noam Pikelny on banjo, Chris Eldridge on guitar and Dennis Crouch on bass. The Session transcribes it as a reel in D.
