The role of minstrel music in fiddling (Climbing the Golden Stairs)

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Hello, and welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast, featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller, and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Climbing the Golden Stairs from an old time jam at the R house in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to dive into a little bit of a difficult topic. I'm going to be talking about minstrel music's influence on fiddle tunes. I didn't know that much about fiddle tunes and minstrel music, until I discovered that the composer of the tune Golden Slippers was James Bland. 

On one hand, James Bland was a very famous African American songwriter. As far as I know, he was one of the first black songwriters to really make a good living as a songwriter. And he traveled and he wrote a lot of very popular, very influential music. On the other hand, the genre he was working in was minstrel music. 

If you don't know what minstrel music is, here's how I taught it to middle schoolers. Actually, funny story. Last year, I was teaching music. In middle school and school wide, we had a project to study the period of American history, it was the period after the Civil War. 

I wrote on the board and I said, much of the music in America during the late 1800s came from two places. It had roots in Europe or roots in Africa. So we talked about music with roots in Europe, primarily classical music, opera, comic operas, there were hymns, Christian hymns, and of course fiddle, fiddle and dance music. And then there was a lot of music with roots in Africa. So this was spirituals that later became blues, Ragtime. All of those genres made up part of the music that was being played and composed and listened to and enjoyed in America. 

But there was I said, to my middle schoolers, there was another genre of music that was uniquely American, and was more popular than all of these put together. What was that? And none of them knew what it was. And so I told them, I said it was called minstrel music. Do you know what that is? And I think it was just one kid was like, oh, maybe. So, minstrel music was racist music that was devoted entirely to mocking African Americans and formerly enslaved people. The kids were like, what? Why would they do that? So we, you know, we talked about it. 

So there's very little redeeming about the history of minstrel music, what it was used for socially, and the role it played in society. This came up for me because I was searching for a tune that we had played at the jam, and they had called it Climbing the Golden Stairs. And when I searched around for this tune, I found a minstrel tune by the same name. 

This happens every now and then, like I said, Golden Slippers was a tune that I knew was associated with the minstrel music. When I find out that a fiddle tune comes out of the minstrel tradition, I tried to always, then identify it, especially when I'm teaching it, I'll only teach it in context. I don't teach Golden Slippers to very little kids anymore, because I don't want to stop and talk to them about what minstrel music is. 

I'll teach it to older kids or adults where I can give them that context, because some people just don't want to play anything that comes out of the minstrel tradition. And some people want to know what they're playing. And I think there are some people for whom it doesn't matter. But there are a lot of different approaches. And by identifying the history, then you give folks the option to choose to play something else, if that bothers them. In the words of David Smukler who told me a long time ago when I said to him, "I don't like that tune," And he said, "there are a million fiddle tunes in the world. You don't have to play ones that you don't like."

We'll jump into this tune, which the melody that we played at the jam bears no resemblance whatsoever to the minstrel song called Climbing the Golden Stairs. So I'm going to have to assume that this is a different tune that has either been mis-named, or that there's something else going on here that I don't quite understand. I'm going to give you the information that I know.

If you can look up the song there are a lot of different words to Climbing the Golden Stairs. I found a lot of different versions on bluegrassmessengers.com, but one of the more prominent versions is very overtly racist and features the N word. Be careful about that. And let's keep in mind that no matter what version, it is, whether it has the N word or not the whole genre was racist. So you have to keep that in mind. 

But it was hard for me to figure out how this tune could even be related to that melody because they were, like I said they were completely different. I did find this version of this melody under the name Climbing the Golden Stairs on a site called had a funny name. Tater Joe's. So you can go to Tater Joe's, like Trader Joe's. And he's got a lot of fiddle tunes transcribed there. It's Mark Wardenburg's site. 

He had transcribed this it's pretty close to how we played it. He said it came from the band the Bucking Mules. They had cited the fiddler Edward Winter out of Tennessee. Time for a new name for this tune. I do not think that this tune has descended from the song Climbing the Golden Stairs but I do not know where it came from. Do you have any information, let me know. We're going to play this tune for you now.
It has a very distinctive opening.

Thanks so much for listening. You can head over to fiddle studio.com for the sheet music to this and all of the tunes I teach. I'll be back next time with another tune for you have a wonderful day.