“Valley Forge” is a fiddle breakdown from the Arkansas Ozarks. It is traced to the songwriter Jimmie Driftwood, born James Corbett Morris and a schoolteacher from Timbo, Arkansas, who learned it from the fiddler Absie Morrison. Absie and his twin brother Abbie, also a fiddler, were born on 12 November 1876 in Campbell, Searcy County. On 3 June 1930 the twins went to Memphis to record for Victor, with three of Abbie’s sons on guitars and banjo.
Morrison’s repertoire held a number of pieces named for events in American history. This one refers to the winter of 1777–78, when George Washington’s Continental Army camped at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. Where Morrison found the melody, and whether the name was his, is not known. The family had a story of its own: that one of the Morrisons had been a fiddler for Washington and played at Valley Forge to liven up the camp.
Among later old-time fiddlers the tune spread mainly through Ramona Jones, who may have learned it from Driftwood. Around 1973 she recorded it for her Happy Valley album Back Porch Fiddlin’, with Ray Edenton on guitar, Red Rector on mandolin, Mark Jones on banjo and Joe Zinkan on bass. In 1980 she and Mark Jones recorded it again for Women of Old Time Music. Jones played it in A, with the fiddle cross-tuned AEae, but most fiddlers who took it up play it in D. Settings are printed in Phillips’s Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994), Silberberg’s Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern (2002) and Beisswenger and McCann’s Ozark Fiddle Music (2008), which took its version from Driftwood. Recordings well beyond Arkansas include one by the Canadian singer and banjo player Kaia Kater on Sorrow Bound (2014) and one by the banjo player Russ Carson on Songs That Birds Don’t Sing (2025).
