Kerry Mills composed “Whistling Rufus” in 1899, at the start of the ragtime era. Born Frederick Allen Mills in Philadelphia in 1869, he trained as a violinist and ran the violin department of the University of Michigan’s School of Music before moving to New York in 1895. There he started his own publishing firm, F. A. Mills, to issue his work. He had already written “At a Georgia Camp Meeting” (1897), and “Red Wing” followed in 1907. When “Whistling Rufus” was published it was billed as a “characteristic march” that “can be used effectively as a two-step, polka or cakewalk.” The first page of the music carries a short sketch of its title character: a musician in Alabama’s Black Belt without whom no cakewalk was worth attending, who played alone, accompanying his own whistling on an old guitar, and called himself a “one-man band.”
The piece reached records almost at once. Vess L. Ossman, the leading banjoist of the 1890s, known as “The Banjo King,” cut it on a cylinder around 1899. Within a generation it had passed into the fiddling of the rural South and West. Fiddlers around Rock Ridge, Alabama, were playing it about 1920. The Arizona fiddler Kenner C. Kartchner called it “a good two-step from around 1900.” It appears in Vance Randolph’s list of traditional Ozark fiddle tunes, published in 1954, and the West Virginia fiddler Edden Hammons had it in his repertoire. One writer, Cauthen (1990), classed it as a minstrel piece that passed into fiddling tradition, though on what authority is not known.
The early country 78s followed. Ernest Thompson recorded it for Columbia in 1924, the Kessinger Brothers cut it in 1929 for Brunswick, and Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers’ version, backed with “Miss McLeod’s Reel,” came out on Columbia in January 1932. In November 1957 Mike Seeger recorded Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith playing it with Sam and Kirk McGee at Kirk McGee’s home in Nashville, for Folkways. Across the Atlantic, the Scottish accordionist and dance-band leader Jimmy Shand made it popular in Scotland and Ireland with a 1950s recording.
Fiddle settings run in G major. Some add a third strain in C major. Stacy Phillips notes that the first section is sometimes bowed right next to the bridge, which gives a whistle-like tone.
