Henry Reed Collection

The Henry Reed Collection documents the fiddling of Henry Reed (1884 to 1968), recorded at his home in Glen Lyn, Giles County, Virginia, by Alan Jabbour during 1966 and 1967, when Reed was in his eighties. The repertoire came from across the state line. Reed was born near Peterstown in Monroe County, West Virginia, and took up fiddle and banjo there before the turn of the century, learning from players a generation or more older than himself, among them Quince Dillion, born in 1810 and a fifer in the Mexican War. He married in 1907 and settled in Glen Lyn, a few miles away in Virginia, where he spent the rest of his life playing for local dances and more often in music sessions at home. He also played harmonica, and he never worked as a professional musician.Jabbour was a graduate student in English at Duke University at the time and pursued the fiddle recording independently, traveling the Upper South between 1965 and 1968 with his own equipment and at his own cost. His wife, Karen Singer Jabbour, is credited as co-collector on many of the Glen Lyn sessions and took several of the photographs later published with the collection.

The recordings reached the Library by invitation. A reference librarian at the Archive of Folk Song met Jabbour at a Duke folklore conference in 1964 and encouraged him to bring his tapes in for duplication, which he did in 1967 and again in 1969. The copies entered the Archive of Folk Song, now the American Folklife Center, and are held as the Alan Jabbour duplication project, part 1 (AFC 1967/007) and part 2 (AFC 1969/008). Jabbour went on to head the Archive from 1969 to 1974 and to serve as founding director of the American Folklife Center from 1976 to 1999. The online presentation, released in 2000, gathers 184 recordings from the two duplication collections along with nineteen pages of fieldnotes and sixty-nine transcriptions, with item-level notes giving key, meter, part structure, range, and the order in which Reed played the parts.

Reed’s tunes spread through the Hollow Rock String Band, the Durham group in which Jabbour played fiddle alongside Tommy Thompson on banjo, Bobbie Thompson on guitar, and Bertram Levy on mandolin. The band worked up arrangements of material Jabbour had recorded from Reed as a solo fiddler, and its album Traditional Dance Tunes, cut for Kanawha in 1967 and issued in 1968, carried “Over the Waterfall,” “Kitchen Girl,” and other Glen Lyn tunes into the old-time revival. Reed died before the record reached him.