This is a project to digitize the music in the personal notebook of a fiddler named William Litten, which I discovered via an out-of-print book titled "William Litten's Fiddle Tunes: 1800-1802." The book was written by Gale Huntington and published in 1977 in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, by Hines Point Publishers. As far as I can tell the original had only a single run. It was probably self-publishing. I came across it in a bookstore in Boston ("Ave. Victor Hugo") around 1982.
In the forty-ish years since since then I have returned to the book again and again, and my copy has become badly worn. The cover is falling off. The binding won't last much longer. Yet there seems to be no alternative to my dog-eared copy. It's out of print, so I can't buy a new one. There appear to be no digitized scans, though several academic libraries appear to have listings of hard copy versions.
In addition to my personal need to have a replacement for the book, letting it disappear seems wrong to me. This knowledge and these sounds shouldn't be lost. Huntington's publication of Litten's hand-written original kept it alive for me. I hope this digital version here and at williamlitten.gonze.com will keep it alive for other musicians and music historians.
In addition I hope to make improvements:
The best introduction to the story as of 1977 is in Huntington's book on pages 6-7. To (over)simplify that story and add subsequent events:
| When | Who | Where | What |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1800-1802 | William Litten | Sea voyage from England to China | A ship's fidder in the British Navy compiles a tunebook for his own reference |
| 1802 | Allen Coffin | Nantucket Island, Massachusetts | A fellow sailor brings Litten's notebook home to an island off the coast of Massachusetts. |
| Before 1977 | Unknown | Martha's Vineyard Island, near Nantucket | The notebook comes into the possession of the Dukes County Historical Society in Edgartown, Massachusetts. |
| 1977 | Gale Huntington | Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts | A Martha's Vineyard historian publishes an edition of the notebook. |
| 1982 | Lucas Gonze | Boston, Massachusetts | Music student purchases Huntington's book. |
| 2022 | Lucas Gonze | Oakland, California | Software engineer scans the book into an open-source git repository. |
| 2022 | You | Github | Community members create digital transcriptions of each tune |
The next step in this project is digital transcriptions of each tune. You can help!
Although I am confident my transcription and distribution of this work would pass a fair use challenge, it would be good to simply put the entire book under a permissive license. In hopes of convincing the rights holder to do that I attempted to find them. These are the facts that I discovered.
The original publication was in 1977 in the state of Massachusetts.
The author, Elon Gale Huntington, died in 1993 in Massachusetts. Obituary.
Rights probably passed to the author's wife, Mildred Tilton Huntington. She died in 2003 in Massachusetts. Record on Find-a-Grave.
Rights probably passed to the author's child, Emily Huntington Rose. She died in 2013 in Massachusetts. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/192476433/emily-rose
Rights would have passed to author's grandchildren, but I found no record of Emily Huntington Rose having children.
Rights could conceivably has passed to siblings of Elon Gale Huntington or Mildred Tilton Huntington, but there were none.
The above concerns Gale Huntington's copyright. My own copyrights on this repository are under the Apache Public License version 2.
You do not need my permission to use my work. If I am unavailable to grant you permission, you should proceed. However I cannot grant you permissions to Gale Huntington's work.
If you make improvements or changes, I hope very strongly that you will make them available to others, ideally by submitting your changes to this Git repository.