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This epilogue focuses on “Forked Deer.” It is one of very few fiddle tunes that now flourish in southern fiddle styles ranging from straightforward to quite fancy, and throughout the United States—in old-time fiddling in the Upper South, in exuberant West Virginia styles, and in the melodic improvisations of the modern contest fiddling originating in Texas. Both the title and the melody of “Forked Deer” enter the historical record in George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels. Like most southern fiddle tunes, however, “Forked Deer” did not make it into the nineteenth-century mainstream of instrumental anthologies. In fact, this tune found its way into just one publication later in that century. The chapter then considers the title “Forked Deer.” The multivalence of the title “Forked Deer” plus the particular retitling of the tune touch most of the normal categories for fiddle tune titles in the American South.

This chapter talks about the different styles and meanings in Southern Fiddling. Since the previous chapters have talked all about the historical context, the appearance and meaning of these festivals, this chapter focuses upon the music that brings all these elements and people together. It starts by looking at a few tunes in a moderately technical manner, then the paths of meaning from individual performance and individual fiddler through style and event, down to Southern American fiddling as a whole. It takes a look at “Leather Britches” for example, a tune that has been among the twenty or thirty most popular fiddle tunes throughout the South for at least the last eighty years. The chapter then takes a look at other memorable and classic tunes that basically make up and build the culture around fiddling.

This chapter examines the titles of George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels. Just a few of the melodies making up the Virginia Reels bear their customary modern names or similar ones in that publication, few enough that they can be listed quickly. Several titles are close to their usual ones. Fiddle tune titles serve as handy identifiers and can add value to these short tunes by being piquant, intriguing, by asserting an alliance between music and social values or local identity, or by combining several virtues. However, titles of tunes had been undervalued by earlier scholars, who characterized them as of little interest since they were impermanently linked to the tunes. In looking at changes in titles, similarities of many kinds could symptomize relationships between titles and often between tunes, including patterns of syntax, rhythmic patterns of versification where tunes are texted, conceptual relatedness, and retention of morphemes and phonemes.

This chapter explores Manitoban aboriginal fiddle music and develops in more detail the intersecting concepts of “intimacies” and “imaginaries.” It considers the metrical and structural irregularities characteristic of older Manitoban aboriginal fiddling styles, and how these have often been smoothed in recent decades. It suggests that this musical transformation mirrors a broader social one: in the past, aboriginal fiddling addressed predominately “intimate” contexts of family and community music making, but now it increasingly hails musical publics: that is to say, audiences of unknown musicians and listeners, oriented to one another through recordings, broadcasts, and publications. The chapter also considers a countervailing musical trend that nevertheless indexes the same transformation of sociability: the drive to preserve older, “crooked” ways of playing as a part of the musical heritage of the aboriginal fiddling public.

This introductory chapter provides a background of George P. Knauff and his Virginia Reels, the first printed collection to contain lots of tunes and tune titles known to fiddlers in the American South today. Knauff himself was a fascinating individual, but he did not achieve the level of celebrity that leaves bold traces in the historical record. His most notable accomplishment, publishing the Virginia Reels, was a modest venture for him, one among many small sources of income. He was a musician and merchant trying to support his family. Ultimately, his combination of an original mind with a high-powered work ethic led him to publish this unusual and important tune collection. The Virginia Reels themselves present a complicated picture due to their having been issued several times, and by two publishers.