My Dad’s friend Baptiste was a fiddling wizard. This feller was old! He remembered when Methuselah had a paper route, and he knew every alternate tuning that was ever sawed across a fiddle. My favorite was what he called the ‘Creole Cross.’
Baptiste would tune the fiddle down to 4th G / 3rd C / 2nd G / 1st C explaining that Cajun and Creole musicians love to play in the keys of C and G. The he would perpetrate a little bowing magic he called “palming the frog.” He would take the frog completely off the bow and he would rock the bow under the fiddle’s back while holding the frog in his palm, and loosely running the hair over the top so he could bow across all the strings at once.
Baptiste said that the “Cajun” just wouldn’t come out of his fiddle until ‘old Scratch’ hopped out of a paper bag (presumably with a rum bottle in it), and taught him ‘the Debbul’s notes’ (drone), to slide into double-stops, and put a distinctive syncopated lope in his bowing rhythm. He said Cajun fiddlers also need to know, that for ‘le bon Dieu’ to redeem ‘ya im-motal soul,’ ya gotta fiddle on the Creole Cross.
I ain’t much of a fiddler (in fact I am painfully awful at it), but from time to time I tune my mandolin in Creole Cross for a tune or two. After all, I am fond of le bon Dieu (the good Lord), so I ain’t a-takin’ any chances!
I invite you to take a lingerin’ listen to Bonaparte’s Retreat played on the mandolin, in what I was taught to be Creole Cross tuning.
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Thanks for stoppin’ by today! Ya’ll come back and we’ll do some pickin’.
TH