"Over the Waterfall" -- another D Mixolydian fiddle tune for the Clayville-Prairieland Sessions

At last week's session at Peace Lutheran Church, we took a flying run at "Over the Waterfall." I called the tune because we used to enjoy it when we played it, but we haven't done it in a while and we're getting rusty. Then things got embarrassing in a hurry. Turned out I couldn't get the melody in my head, and we didn't have enough sheet music to go around anyway.

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Our "third Thursday" session is 7-9 p.m. Thursday at Peace Lutheran Church, 2800 West Jefferson, Springfield.

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So I decided we'd better put it off till this week.

And here it is.

This clip, from the Mount Airy festival in North Carolina, shows a "Musician from Pittsburgh" playing it. I don't know who she is, and the guy who made the video didn't get it. (He didn't give his name, either, so I guess he's known to posterity as YouTube user xanther97.) Whoever she is, she's got the ornamentation and double-stopping (playing two notes at the same time) of traditional appalachian fiddle playing down.

We meet from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday at Peace Lutheran Church (formerly Atonement, Faith and Luther Memorial), 2800 West Jefferson, Springfield.

Last summer I put up some background information about the tune -- including this not-to-be-missed graphic on the Kitchen Musician website for hammered dulcimer players -- on Hogfiddle. Permalink at:

http://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2015/07/over-waterfall-clayville.html

A lead sheet with dulcimer tab is available in Steve Seifert's Join the Jam, and two sets of dulcimer tab are available on line:

• http://bellingham-dulcimer-club.blogspot.com/p/music.html (scroll down and click on "Over the Waterfall"). Put up by the Bellingham (Wash.) Dulcimer Club, it has dulcimer tab, notation and backup chords for guitar and other rhythm instruments.

• http://www.threeriversdulcimersociety.net/Music/OvertheWaterfall.pdf (PDF file linked to 3RDS' "Loose Pages" directory). Dulcimer tab. No chords. Put up on the Web by the Three Rivers Dulcimer Society of Richland, Wash.

It's a Mixolydian tune, but both sets of tab, Bellingham's and Three Rivers' alike, are written in the key of D with the C-natural indicated by an accidental. It's that C-natural that gives the tune its Mixolydian flavor -- what musicians call a "flatted seventh" and old-time southern Appalachian call that old D modal key that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up when it's played right. (The "Musician from Pittsburgh" who's linked above plays it right.)