Elzic's Farewell

West Virginia fiddler French Carpenter told it this way: his ancestor Elzic played this as a farewell before leaving for the Civil War, and never came home. Jim Comstock's research, printed in his West Virginia Songbag (1974), found a different origin.

By Comstock's account, Harvey G. Elswick, born in Pike County, Kentucky, in 1838 and a Civil War veteran, wrote it in April 1889 in Kanawha County, West Virginia. His mother, dying, asked him to play his fiddle for her one more time, and this was the tune. Wilson Douglas learned it from Carpenter and played it in standard tuning, though many play it cross tuned.