Thomas Jefferson's Music - "The music of Scotland may almost be called the national music of Virginia"

 This is a superb article, from Slate magazine in 2012:

"... In 1838, his spunky granddaughter Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge wrote in her travel diary that “The music of Scotland may almost be called the national music of Virginia. The simple, plaintive or sprightly airs which every body knows and every body sings are Scotch. … This music is natural, intelligible, comes home to every body’s business and bosom.”

America also borrowed from the Scotch and Irish the fiddle tune. Though Jefferson himself didn’t do much fiddling at Monticello, others did. Isaac Jefferson Granger, one of his slaves, said that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas’ little brother, “used to come out among the black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.” The sons of Sally Hemings played frequently when Jefferson’s daughters and granddaughters wanted dance music. According to Jefferson’s granddaughter, “On Saturday next the youngsters of Monticello intend to adjourn to the South-Pavilion and dance after Beverley [Hemings’] music.”..."

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Ellen was 30 years old when her grandfather Thomas died in 1826, and she wrote the above account twelve years later. That the music of Scotland was so prominent is no surprise – the Jefferson homeplace at Monticello outside Charlottesville was in the flat, plantation-ready plains – sweeping down from the Appalachian mountains, which had of course been so heavily settled by Ulster-Scots. Thomas Jefferson would later write of "the wild Irish who had gotten possession of the valley between the blue ridge and North mountain".

And the first published collection of fiddle tunes, George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels was published just a year after Ellen's diary entry, in 1839 - a collection described by Paul Wells in 2012 as 'strongly Scottish' (previous post here).