Chairs rocking on the veranda, a dip of snuff tucked between the lips and gums and feet tapping to the sounds of folk music being played by fiddlers. This is a memory of days gone by for many southerners and one that local resident Hazel Milner said she recalls. Milner said she was 8 years old when her grandfather died, but remembers times of visiting and listening to him play the fiddle.

“My grandparents’ home was a gathering place, and I can remember seeing him sit on the porch. He had a special place where he sat, and he would play the fiddle,” Milner said.

Milner’s grandfather, Stephen Benjamin Tucker lived in Collinsville and is one of the Mississippi fiddlers highlighted in “Mississippi Fiddle Tunes and Songs from the 1930s.”

Written by Harry Bolick and Stephen T. Austin the book includes the history of how Mississippi folk music was collected, hundreds of musical tunes, which were transcribed by Bolick, photos and biographical information on the fiddlers.

Bolick, who is a Mississippi native that teaches fiddle and mandolin in Garrison N.Y. and holds workshops on Mississippi fiddle tunes throughout the U.S., said he was prompted to write the book after he became interested in locating field recordings that were made in Mississippi.

Bolick said he had learned about the recordings in the 1970s after discovering reissues of commercial 78 rpm records of Mississippi string band and fiddlers made in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The recordings were done by the Works Progress Administration, which was enacted as a work creation program for people after the Great Depression, Bolick said, and the Federal Music Project, which was an entity of the WPA that sent musicians to Mississippi in the summer of 1936.

“The FMP was trying to employ people in Mississippi,” Bolick said, and there were about 130 teachers that came to teach classical violin and piano, which provided 130 jobs.”

However, after the outbreak of polio in the state that same year, schools were closed because people feared transmission of the disease or the possibility of it, Bolick said.

With no jobs, these teachers who were sent to the state under the arts program had nothing to do.

In an effort to keep them employed, Bolick said the government decided to send them out into the field to collect research on folk music.

The teachers, who were not trained field workers, Bolick said, managed to collect more than 3,500 songs and tunes in manuscript form during the summer, “but no recordings.”

By the fall, these teachers were able to return to work and since the material they collected was the property of the U.S. Government, it bounced back and forth from Washington to Mississippi.

There were ambitions of doing a book, but no way to pull it off, Bolick said.

In January of 1939, musicologist Charles Seeger, who was the administrator of the Federal Music Project in Washington, found the research manuscripts that had been conducted in 1936.

He realized what a musical treasure there was in Mississippi, Bolick said, and with the help of others in the WPA, who also saw the value of these manuscripts, it was decided to send a recording truck to Mississippi to document live performances.

“In 1939, Herbert Halpert, who was a young folk artist, loaded up in a donated WWI ambulance that had been restored,” Bolick said, and headed to Mississippi to gather recordings.

“The ambulance is filled with 300 pounds of recording equipment, food and cots and Halpert drives to Mississippi in this sound wagon as it was named to meet up with staff from the federal writers and musicians projects, who set up the itinerary since they knew where the sources were,” Bolick said.

Once arriving in Mississippi, Halpert was paired with Abbot Ferriss, who was with the Federal Writers Project, and his job was to document the recording project, Bolick said.

During the research, the men documented 400 performances before Halpert returned to Washington.

Milner’s grandfather was recorded in his hometown of Collinsville, and he was 80-years-old at that time.

He said he had learned to play the fiddle when he was 9 or 10 years old and also admitted winning a few fiddling contest.

“I commenced going to old fiddlers contest and most always I won the prize. Reason I did this is I was the oldest and ugliest man,” Tucker said in the field recordings.

Bolick said, shortly after the recordings had been gathered, the arts projects were all terminated and the 147 fiddle or banjo recordings done by Halpert were deposited in the Library of Congress.

While researching for the field recordings at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Bolick discovered there were also photos that had been archived in Jackson, and it was there where he found the field recordings he had been searching for, he said.

Since making the discovery, Bolick said he has had the opportunity to meet some of the family members, like Milner, of these Mississippi fiddlers.