About This Song

Colored Aristocracy is a traditional West Virginia fiddle tune with the strut of a turn-of-the-century cakewalk. Its title shows up on older sheet music, including an 1899 cakewalk and a song from the 1902 Williams and Walker show In Dahomey, but neither of those melodies is the tune fiddlers play today. Today's tune goes back to the Rich family of Morgantown. Charles Seeger recorded them for the Library of Congress in 1936 at a folk festival in Arthurdale, a Depression-era resettlement community backed by Eleanor Roosevelt. His son Mike learned it as a boy by playing those aluminum discs at home. Later he made it one of the first tunes his New Lost City Ramblers recorded, and that's how revival fiddlers picked it up. It also goes by Southern Aristocracy, and in parts of West Virginia it's called The Young Man Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn.

The 6 minor in the second bar isn't fixed. Players have used both a minor and a major chord there, and the Ramblers recorded it both ways.