Mississippi Sawyer

A sawyer, in river talk, was an uprooted tree snagged on the bottom, its trunk bobbing up and down in the current and sometimes surfacing without warning in front of a boat. On the Mississippi they were bad enough that the government ran snag boats to clear them, Charles Wolfe explains.

One early printing is in George Knauff's Virginia Reels (Baltimore, 1839) as "Love from the Heart." Many older fiddlers called it "The Downfall of Paris," and John Hatcher was recorded playing it under that name in Mississippi in 1939.