On Aug 18, 2019, at 7:33 AM, Linda S. Mrosko via Callers
<callers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
> And 4 potatoes. Anybody got a good 4 potatoes story?
I have one.
You may think that "4 potatoes" is an old traditional name for that little
sequence of fiddle shuffles sometime used to start off a tune. San Francisco
Bay area fiddler Jody Stecher claims that he and banjo player Pete Wernick
invented it in the 1960s as an experiment to see if they could get it to catch
on (as we would now say, "go viral"). See this thread in the MandolinCafe
discussion forum:
https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/threads/92314-Four-Potatoes-Professor
The same claim is also discussed in this thread on FiddleHangout:
https://www.fiddlehangout.com/archive/740
In each of these discussion threads someone suggests a possible connection to
the children's rhyme "One potato, two potato, three potato, four. ..."
However, such a connection seems unlikely to me, since (as I'm not the first to
notice) the rhythms of the children's rhyme and the fiddle shuffle are not the
same.
Paul Kotapish, the original poster in the MandolinCafe thread wrote:
> It has occurred to me, of course, that Jody might have been pulling my leg,
> and that his story about inventing the expression might be the actual bit of
> folklore.
The same thought occurred to me the first time I heard Jody's story. However,
I don't know of any documented use of the term "four potatoes" for an
introductory fiddle shuffle predating the claimed time frame of the 1960s. In
fact, the earliest example I found with the few searches I tried in Google's
Advanced Book Search is on page 173 of the 6th (1988) edition of the book
_Dance A While_ by Jane Harris, Ann Pottman, and Marlys Waller:
... The caller needs to agree with the musicians about the music
introduction, so that both the caller and the dancers can get
off to a good, crisp start. "Two or four potatoes" or a chord
are typical.
This is in the contra section, which was significantly updated from the 5th
(1978) edition of the book. In a cursory skim of the introduction to the
contra section in the 1978 edition, I didn't notice the term "potatoes."
To be absolutely clear, Jody and Peter don't claim to have invented the
introductory shuffle itself (which I presume has long been used as a way for a
fiddler to set the tempo and help all the members of the band come in on the
tune together). They only claim to have coined and spread the name "four
potatoes" to describe it.
If anyone can find a documented case of the term "potatoes" being used for a
fiddle shuffle before the 1960's, I'd like to know about it.
I recall Jody telling me that he and Pete (or maybe just Pete) tried to spread
a couple other neologisms around the same time that they came up with "four
potatoes," but I don't remember what they were. I think he said that
"potatoes" was the only one that caught on.
--Jim
_______________________________________________
List Name: Callers mailing list
List Address: Callers@lists.sharedweight.net
Archives: https://www.mail-archive.com/callers@lists.sharedweight.net/
