![[Alan's Picture]](jabbour.jpg)
Alan Jabbour is one of America's foremost exponents of the style known as "old-time" or "Appalachian" fiddling. Not only is his playing spirited and lively, but his style authentically reflects in all its charm and rhythmic power the playing styles of nineteenth-century fiddlers from the Upper South in rural America.
Alan is also an engaging raconteur, and a major part of his presentation consists of telling stories about both the tunes he plays, and the fiddlers he learned them from.
In the mid-1960s, Alan made numerous trips to North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, to record instrumental folk music, folksong, and folklore on tape. These documentation trips verged into a process of apprenticeship, and he began playing the fiddle under the influence of several old-time fiddling masters. In particular, he learned the style and repertory of Henry Reed, a fiddler then in his eighties who lived along the New River in Glen Lyn, Virginia. Reed himself had learned from local fiddlers like Quince Dillion, who was born about 1810.
As Alan began to learn the regional fiddling style and repertory of the Upper South, he joined together with three other young musicians to form a band devoted to playing these old-time tunes. This band, which included Tommy Thompson on the five-string banjo, Bertram Levy on the mandolin, and Bobbie Thompson on the guitar, was known as the Hollow Rock String Band. The Hollow Rock band was at the core of an old-time music scene that blossomed in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina in the late 1960s, and it served as the prototype for many of the North American old-time music "revival" bands that were to follow in their wake over the next few decades. In 1968, the year that Henry Reed passed away, the band released a long-playing record called iThe Hollow Rock String Band: Traditional Dance Tunes/i, which has recently been reissued by County Records as a CD (County Records CO-CD-2715).
Alan's career has influenced the course of the traditional music revival in North America. Not only was his Hollow Rock Band a national prototype in terms of style, but their tunes, which Alan had collected during his research expeditions, have become "standards" at old-time music sessions and festivals. If you are familiar with tunes like "Over the Waterfall,""West Fork Gals," "Cold Frosty Morning," "Kitchen Girl,""Ebenezer,""Big Scioty," "Green Willis" and "Quince Dillion's High D Tune," you should be aware that Alan's work brought these to the attention of the world outside western Virginia.
His influence became even more pronounced over the years, as he continued to record important old-time musicians. His original field recordings from the mid-60s are now in the Archive of Folk Culture, and his recordings of Henry Reed are now available on line through a Library of Congress website called Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection. In addition, he published a set of recordings documenting the Hammons family of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, and he edited a long-playing record drawn from earlier recordings in the Archive of Folk Culture, which was published in 1971 as American Fiddle Tunes (both these recordings, as well as recordings of Edden Hammons from 1947, are now available on CD).
Alan devoted much of his working career to the field of folklore. He was head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress (now the Archive of Folk Culture), founding director of the Folk Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and founding director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. He also served for a term as president of the American Folklore Society. He has published widely over the years on the subject of folklore and folklife, including many publications on American folksong and instrumental folk music, and he is a frequent lecturer on topics related to folklore and folklife, folk music, and cultural policy.
His most recent CD as a performer, released in 2002, is A Henry Reed Reunion , and he is also working on a four-CD set of his original Henry Reed field recordings.