We are attempting to bring back to life a portion of this legacy of traditional music, and we can do no better than echo John Taggart's own understated words about the tunes: "they were all taught me during my boyhood days in Sharon, by the various 'fiddlers' in the vicinity…I trust someone may find them of interest."

John A., the youngest of 8 children, was the fifth generation Taggart to reside in Sharon. The original Taggart was Scotch-Irish, that is, a Scotsman from the north of Ireland, who came to Massachusetts Bay about 1740 but soon struck out for the wilds of New Hampshire. John A.'s mother's ancestors were 17th-century Massachusetts Bay colonists named Piper. John Taggart's maternal grandmother Pettis (1789-18670 lived with the family in her old age, and he recalls her singing the "songs of her own and former periods." She sang ballads, rhymes and spinning songs. Indeed, to the boy, the whirring of the spinning wheel itself was music. His father, Phineas Taggart, (1812-1892), farmed 140 acres at the foot of Temple Mountain, with a splendid view of Mount Monadnock to the northwest. He was a fiddler and dancing master in the 1830's and 40's, teaching in all the surrounding towns. Phineas was a great lover of Burns, whose poems he could recite at length, and "was much given to using quaint Scotch words…He was a beautiful dancer…my mother was also an extremely graceful dancer."

Phineas B. Taggart*

Dancing was second nature to the Taggarts and certain of their neighbors, an unquestioned social event amidst the week's agenda. Either at the local dance hall, or more likely, in the Taggart's kitchen, 4 or 5 families would gather, old and young mingling in "the mazy dance." They new "Quadrilles" but danced mostly contras, the figures of which were known by heart. One fiddler with good timing was considered sufficient for the music. Refreshments were served at midnight and daybreak. The dancers of his parent's generation "had certain 'steps' for every bar of the tune, and every motion was grace personified, and their deportment may be described by the one word Courtly. I take it that their style of dancing was identical with that of Washington's time." His father danced hornpipes and reels to a slow tempo and could execute the Pigeons Wing, a balance step using 4 bars of music, describes as a "winking" of first the right, then the left foot, so complicated "not one in a hundred could master it." Other showy balance steps had names like High Betty Martin, Double Shuffle, tip Top Five, Ten Step, Braise (invented by a neighbor Joe Barnes which consisted of spinning around 2 or 3 times on the left foot "followed by bewildering flourishes with the right."), and the Cooper Step (made up by Jesse Spofford wherein the dancer jumps up, crashes his boot heels together in midair, then thumps on the floor "for rhythm's sake"). The spruce floor boards in the Sharon kitchens, John A. relates, got worn down until the slippery knots stuck up.

Phineas B. Taggart Farm*

John Taggart took up the violin at age 12, practicing in the old barn, tutored by an older brother. He formed a fiddle, fife, and drum band with the White boys, and by age 15 was playing for dances. Fiddlers abounded in Sharon, all within walking distance of John A.-besides his father and brother, there were Isaac White and the Barnes brothers, Joe and Warren. Some year later, while working as an iron molder in Greenfield, Massachusetts, he took formal violin lessons, and "every moment outside the shop was employed in study and practice." He joined Putnam's Orchestra in 1877, which had 1st and 2nd violins, cornet, two clarinets, trombone and bass. John Putnam was the famous Franklin County, Massachusetts, prompter and left-handed fiddler, a run-away slave. John A. played 1st violin in another local orchestra, Steigleder's, until 1881 when he married seventeen-year-old Nena King whose dancing aura had transfixed him from the stage. That year he formed his own group, Taggart's Orchestra, playing all over western Massachusetts for the next 14 years. The tunes in his Recollection "were all played by Taggart's Orchestra." John A. gave up music as a business in 1895, thereafter playing "only as a pastime" and with his two children. His library of dance music was destroyed in a fire in 1895, but his violin, a "Kurkshaw" made in 1802 which cost "125.00 was saved.

Forced by poor prospects to leave his father's worn-out farm in his twenties, John A. applied himself to many trades: foundryman, livery owner, carriage painter, auctioneer, and finally Street Railway executive. He kept in touch with his native New Hampshire by frequent visits. He died in 1943 at the age of 88. Nothing further than his own written memoir can reveal more of the music, dancing and life of John Adams Taggart in 19th-century Sharon, for he has no surviving direct descendants. Yet it contains a tremendous tale, and enough uncanny wisdom to have insured at least the survival of his music.

-Randy Miller, September 1989
Quotes are from Taggart's Recollection