'When they struck up 'Money Musk'…'

For the musicologist studying early American music, the Monticello music collection and the instruments played on the mountaintop could provide years of fruitful inquiry. Thomas Jefferson, who was an avid violinist before two wrist injuries sidelined him, amassed volumes of fashionable violin and keyboard sonatas, Scottish folk tunes, and even bawdy drinking songs. His daughters and granddaughters all studied music and had their own large collections of both published works and music they copied out by hand. Every member of Jefferson’s immediate family studied music, which means there were always violins, keyboard instruments, and guitars in the house.

Among white workers and the enslaved Black population at Monticello, there were fiddles, jaw harps, and probably gourd banjos, a distinctly African American invention that Jefferson mentions in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Singing could be found everywhere, even from an anonymous enslaved nursemaid that Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen recalled hearing as a child. She recounted a story in which a conjure woman summons her three dogs in a recitative style, a “sort of low chant,” saving her from a singing devil!

The musical landscape at Monticello helps tell the story of American music. Jefferson’s taste in art music offers a glimpse at the forgotten (but popular in their day) composers of Mozart and Haydn’s time. The music his daughters studied in Paris provides a window into the pedagogy of the era (I’m so curious to know why they purchased all four of Handel’s Coronation Anthems, a rather humorous choice given their father’s role in declaring independence from the British crown celebrated in these works). And the music played by three generations of Black fiddlers in the Hemings and Scott families is an integral part of the story of Black string bands in America, a tradition that continues today through musicians like Rhiannon Giddens and Dom Flemons.

But what’s most interesting to me is the way that music illuminates the complicated relationships between family members at Monticello. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the tune “Money Musk.” Jefferson loved this Scottish fiddle tune, taking the time to write it down in one of his music notebooks (tunes like this were rarely written down at the time, as it was much more common to learn folk music by ear). Years later, “Money Musk” was one of the favorite tunes of fiddler Eston Hemings, Jefferson’s once-enslaved son with Sally Hemings. There’s a hint here of a father passing down a tune to his son, except there’s little chance that this came from a direct interaction between the two, given Jefferson’s aforementioned wrist injuries.

While living in Chillicothe, Ohio, in the mid-1830s and through the 1840s, Eston and his band were beloved for the way they played for dances:

When they struck up ‘Money Musk’, or ‘Wesson’s Slaughter House,’ he was a chump indeed who could sit by and look on without clinching onto a pretty girl and joining the merry throng. 
(Chillicothe Leader, 26 Jan. 1887)

And then there are the dances that Eston’s older brother Beverly played for in the South Pavilion at Monticello. Granddaughters Virginia and Mary invited nearby friends and relatives to these intimate domestic dances, accompanied by Beverly, an enslaved fiddler who, though he was their same age, was also their uncle. In their younger years, the white grandchildren at Monticello had secretly taught the Hemings children to read. Based on the musical prowess of the Hemings men (Eston, Madison, and Beverly were all fiddlers), I can’t help but imagine that Jefferson’s white grandchildren also shared what they learned in their formal music lessons with the Hemings children.

I’ve just finished a documentary and am now writing a book about these fascinating musical interactions at Monticello (both entitled Rock & Reel), with a focus on ten Black fiddlers who navigated complicated racial dynamics, using their forced familial connection to Jefferson and their considerable skill as musicians to amass modest wealth, gain status in their communities, and in some cases, blur the color line. As I prepare for the first major screening of my film on November 15, I’m excited that more people will get to know the fascinating history of music at Monticello!