A wealth of previously undiscovered creativity from the pen of one of America’s most original musicians will come to light this summer with help from MTSU.

Click on the book cover to learn more about “John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes.”

“John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes” will make its debut at the John Hartford Memorial Festival May 31-June 2 at Bill Monroe Music Park in Beanblossom, Indiana.

The book will be available at bookstores starting Monday, June 4.

Dr. Greg Reish, musician, musicologist and director of MTSU’s Center for Popular Music, compiled materials and wrote the text for the book with Hartford’s daughter, Katie Hartford Hogue, and Matt Combs, former member of the John Hartford String Band.

Hartford, perhaps best known for penning the Glen Campbell hit “Gentle on My Mind,” died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2001. He left behind more than 1,000 unpublished and unperformed tunes, which now are protected by copyright.

The book contains 176 of Hartford’s original fiddle tunes and more than 60 of his drawings and photos previously seen only by family members.

“The narrative in the book is focused primarily on John’s life with the fiddle,” Reish said. “He’s known, I would say first and foremost, as a banjo player and a songwriter, but also a fiddle fanatic.”

You can hear Reish and Combs play “Go Home to Your Mother,” one of Hartford’s original fiddle tunes included in the new collection, in the video below.

Reish and his co-authors worked on the book for more than a year and a half, and Reish interviewed Hartford’s family, friends and fellow musicians, including luminaries such as Marty Stuart and Bela Fleck.

A man of wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, Hartford wrote music that combined a reverence for the traditional with contemporary twists that revealed a lifelong love affair with words.

John Hartford (photo by David Schenck)

“His lyrics could be delightfully weird, eccentric at times, but always thought-provoking,” Reish said. “There’s always something distinctive and original in John’s music, and that’s true of his instrumental tunes as much as it is of the songs with words.”

As part of the “Newgrass” movement of the 1970s, Hartford’s authenticity gained currency with the counterculture generation that yearned for something genuine in their music.

Reish asserts that, because Hartford was both a free spirit and a deep thinker, he is as much of an influence today as he was during his lifetime.

“He is just about the only person I can think of who, posthumously, has the full respect and adoration of the folk music community, the country commercial songwriting community, the singer-songwriter community, the Americana community, the bluegrass community, the old-time music community,” Reish said.

The Center for Popular Music now houses a donated treasure trove of Hartford’s papers, pictures, index cards and music manuscript books, which will be made available to students and other scholars for study.

Dr. Greg Reish

Matt Combs

Katie Harford Hogue (photo by Jim McGuire)

The project isn’t the first connecting Hartford with MTSU’s Center for Popular Music.

In January 2016, the center’s Grammy-winning documentary label, Spring Fed Records, released “Home Made Sugar and a Puncheon Floor,” a set of home recordings made by Hartford and fiddling legend Howdy Forrester, to great acclaim.

In that collection of 20 previously unreleased traditional tunes, Hartford plays banjo, Forrester fiddles, and the two share informal discussion about the songs and their sources on the record. You can learn more about it here.

Forrester, the longtime fiddler in Roy Acuff’s band, was one of the most well-known traditional musicians that Hartford visited throughout his career, always recording their conversations and jam sessions.

The Center for Popular Music at MTSU, a part of the College of Media and Entertainment, is one of the nation’s largest and richest repositories of research materials related to American vernacular music.

To contact the MTSU Center for Popular Music, call 615-898-2449, send an email to popular.music@mtsu.edu or visit www.mtsu.edu/popmusic.

For more information about the book or John Hartford’s legacy, go to www.johnhartford.com. To learn more about the John Hartford Memorial Festival, visit www.johnhartfordmemfest.com.

— Gina K. Logue (gina.logue@mtsu.edu)

This stack of manuscript books filled with hand-written original songs from the mind and pencil of music legend John Hartford provides both the source material and a photo included in “John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes,” a new book co-authored by Dr. Greg Reish, director of MTSU’s Center for Popular Music. (Photo courtesy of “John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes”)