Rural Felicity brings together a master fiddler, Jim Wood, with a collection of 18th and 19th American fiddle and fife tunes drawn from an extensive collection of historic, hand-written manuscripts. The American Vernacular Music Manuscripts is an online collection of original, 1730-1910 music manuscripts that come from the collections of the Center for Popular Music and the American Antiquarian Society. Jim carefully researched the site to choose 48 tunes to arrange and record. His collection combines fiddle standards old and new, song melodies, airs, minuets, waltzes and more to offer a glimpse into the music people liked to play in their homes in America a century or more ago. Scholar Chris Goertzen, an authority on early American fiddling, contributed a detailed essay for the liner notes that provide history and context about the tunes and the manuscript collection itself.
