“Tennessee Politics” is one of John Hartford’s more than 2,000 original fiddle tunes, composed during the last eighteen years of his life and preserved in 68 handwritten notebooks found in file cabinets under his desk after his death in 2001. Hartford — banjo player, fiddler, songwriter, and licensed steamboat pilot — spent much of his later career composing in the intensive tradition of the Appalachian contest-fiddle composers who had preceded him, accumulating a manuscript archive of unusual scope for a post-revival musician. Musicologist Greg Reish, fiddler Matt Combs, and Katie Harford Hogue edited 176 of these tunes into John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes (StuffWorks Press, 2018).
“Tennessee Politics” had already circulated in festival jam sessions before the published anthology appeared — one of the channels through which Hartford’s tunes spread through the living performance network during his lifetime and continued to after his death. The title is characteristic Hartford: dry, specific, slightly absurdist — the kind of name that tells you something about the composer’s relationship to the world he lived in without explaining the joke.
Matt Combs recorded it as the opening track of The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project Vol. 1 (2020), with Ronnie McCoury (mandolin), Noam Pikelny (banjo), Chris Eldridge (guitar), and Dennis Crouch (bass). The project was a deliberate effort to bring Hartford’s instrumental writing to a broad bluegrass audience through recordings that paired his lesser-known compositions with leading musicians from the contemporary scene.