Old-Time TOTW #434: Muddy Road to Duck Town (Bob Douglas) 10/18/26 #tennessee #fiddle

Old-Time TOTW #434 is Muddy Road to Duck Town from the playing of Robert McKinley “Uncle Bob” Douglas (9 March 1900—2 May 2001) He was born in Sequatchie College, TN, to Thomas William “Old Fiddling Tom” Douglas (1868-1957) and Mary Ann Harvey (1880-1961). He married Julie Castile (1903-1975) on 9 March, 1923 (Douglas’s 23rd birthday). Sources: Ancestry, public documents, and Family Search. “When he was 15, Douglas went to a country dance on remote Walden’s Ridge one night. When he got there he learned they didn’t have a fiddler, just one old man with a banjo. Well, you can’t have much of a country dance without a fiddle. So, they dug up an old fiddle and gave it young Bob Douglas [sic] and told him to play. There was only one tune he could play, ‘Cincinnati Hornpipe.’ He just played the same tune most all night and the people danced up a storm. They said that was the best dad-gummed fiddlin’ they’d heard in a long time.” (source: The Tennessean, October 23, 1970, from the column “Down to Earth with Elmer Hinton.”) Also in this column, Douglas’s mother was described as “a banjo picker.” Douglas’s father bought him a fiddle when he was 16, and when he was 28, his father’s fiddle was given to him. At age 17, he gave up farming and trapping on Walden’s Ridge to join his father in a square-dance band consisting of Tom on fiddle, Ab Ferguson on clawhammer banjo, and young Bob on guitar. They traveled the mountains by foot and carried their instruments in cornmeal/flour sacks and were often gone for three to four weeks at a time. In a September 1, 1985, article in The Daily News-Journal (Murfreesboro, TN), Bob was quoted as saying: “We’d start up at Pikeville and go out on the Cumberland Mountain, all the way down to Jasper…Then we’d come off into the valley and play a dance or two down there. Then we’d get on Walden’s Ridge Mountain and work ourselves on back home, near Pikeville…It didn’t mean a thing for me to walk 15 or 20 miles.” They would do this every couple of months, even in the winter. People would ask them to play dances at their homes after they played a public dance, and they would pass a hat around. Pay was supplemented with food and lodging. The article also states: “Dances generally began about dark and lasted until after midnight. Occasionally, a dance would continue until sunrise. On Saturday night, however, dances would always end at midnight when Sunday began.” This was not a quote from Douglas. “Occasionally an exceptional dance caller or buckdancer traveled with the trio, and during breaks in the dances, singers and instrumentalists performed. The Daily News-Journal (Murfreesboro, TN) Sept 1, 1985: “Douglas describes his father as one of the best fiddlers he has ever heard. Not only was Tom Douglas skilled at playing hundreds of tunes without missing a beat, but he could play non-stop all night long. “He’d hold his fiddle down here on his knee,” explains Douglas, “I’ve actually seen him playing when I though he went to sleep.”