The Old Time 100 home

About the Old Time 100

The Old Time 100 is a collection of the 100 most popular old-time tunes played in jam sessions across the United States.

We thought it would be funny to try to record 100 old-time fiddle tunes in one day. It was a fun challenge and we knew we could create a lot of educational material from it. We filmed ourselves during the recording and have posted the videos of us playing on our Patreon pages along with some basic transcriptions. We originally wanted to release them all on a single 100-track album, but due to unforeseen logistical constraints (mostly $) we've been releasing the recordings in volumes, twenty at a time.

Picking the tunes

We drew on our knowledge of this music as people who travel the country performing, teaching, and jamming, as well as the knowledge of a wide network of friends and colleagues. Even if this isn't a perfect list of 100 old-time tunes, it's the perfect list for someone trying to learn more about old-time. People usually end up playing the tunes their friends play which is usually about 30 tunes. We corresponded with friends who host old-time jams in different parts of the country and whittled their responses into a list that would capture the most shared tunes. George, acting as musical director, found interesting versions of the tunes for us to play and record.

The recording

George and I (Tristan) became friends once I moved to Nashville in 2018. There used to be an old-time jam every week at a dive bar north of town called Dee's Country Cocktail Lounge. I brought up the idea for this project to George, saying I'd handle a lot of the logistics and he'd be in charge of the music. George knows a lot more about old-time than I do.

We enlisted our friends Amy Alvey (who was running the old-time jam), Frank Evans, and Eli Broxham. They agreed to play all of the tunes with us, and we also invited a bunch of friends to the session so we'd have a second string in case any of us needed a break (which we did). Among the many other musicians that played that day, you're most likely to hear Mark Kilianski on guitar and Casey Campbell on mandolin or guitar. Rafe Stefanini plays fiddle on Durang's Hornpipe.

We wanted the recordings to feel like being in an old-time jam, so every track is one take in a living room during a party. There are mistakes, and you can occasionally hear people in the background eating pizza and laughing. Seventeen hours later, the Old Time 100 shook out, more or less, like this:

About this bibliography

For each tune, this site lists the source recording our version comes from or was inspired by: who played it, where they were from, when it was recorded, and the record it was issued on. The information is based on my own research, but my starting point was almost always the Traditional Tune Archive maintained by Andrew Kuntz. Slippery Hill is a very useful resource for finding and listening to these recordings.

Who we are

Tristan Scroggins playing mandolin

Tristan Scroggins

Tristan Scroggins is a mandolinist, writer, archivist, and teacher in Nashville. He tours with the artist known as Bronwyn and works as a fill-in and session player around town. He won the first FreshGrass Mandolin Award in 2019 and IBMA Writer of the Year in 2021. He built the Women in Bluegrass Archive, co-produced the podcast Don't Call Me Darlin' with Carolyn Kendrick, and co-created the Old Time 100 with George Jackson.

George Jackson playing fiddle

George Jackson

George Jackson is a Nashville-based fiddle player and the 2022 IBMA Instrumentalist Of The Year Momentum Award Winner, who performs as a band leader and fiddler for hire with artists such as The Jacob Jolliff Band, Jake Blount, Tall Poppy String Band, The Local Trio, Front Country, Peter Rowan, Missy Raines, Charm City Junction and others. Born in New Zealand, George grew up in a musical family and first heard bluegrass music around the age of 14, immediately falling in love with the style he started trying to work out how to play it from recordings and from mentors in New Zealand. Moving to Australia as a 16-year-old, he won the Australian National Bluegrass Championship on fiddle three times and toured the country with his bluegrass band, "The Company", playing all the major folk festivals on the Australian circuit. As a resident of Nashville and the USA from 2016, George has released three albums of fiddle tunes, "Time and Place" in 2019 and "Hair & Hide" in 2021 and most recently “George Jackson’s Local Trio” with Eli Broxham and Frank Evans in 2023. He was awarded first place in the Mike Auldridge tune composition award by the DC bluegrass union in both 2019 and 2021 for his tunes "Chapel Hill Deer Stalk" and "Neighbor Mike" respectively. He also sparked a viral fiddle tune frenzy with his composition "Dorrigo", when hundreds of musicians learned the tune and posted videos of themselves playing it online, becoming known as the "#dorrigochallenge". In his free time, George loves to watch Star Trek and cook food at home, with recent obsessions in Italian and Cajun fare. He loves Swedish fiddle music and —fun fact— he was a competitive Highland dancer until the age of 21.

Art

The original Old Time 100 artwork is by Gina Dilg, an old-time fiddler, dancer, and illustrator.

The zine

The Vol. 3 zine is published by High Occulture, a small record label and zine publisher in Los Angeles run by Alex Steed.