Backstep Cindy: A Song History
The tune is generally known as “Backstep Cindy,” the title under which it appears in Stephen Seifert’s old-time jam book Join the Jam II.[1] Other names include “Step-Back Cindy,” “Rockingham Cindy” and “Holly Ding,” and it has often been collected in North Carolina.[2] A Peghead Nation banjo lesson counts it among the standard tunes of the Round Peak repertoire.[3] Tommy Jarrell of Mount Airy and Fred Cockerham of Low Gap both played it, and the Fuzzy Mountain String Band learned their version from Cockerham.[2]
Ben Shahn, “Square dance, Skyline Farms, Alabama,” photograph, 1937. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
Jarrell explained the two names as a matter of geography: on the Virginia side of the Blue Ridge this family of tunes was “Holly Ding,” and below the mountain in North Carolina it was “Back Step Cindy.”[4] Writing in 1981, the collector Ray Alden suggested that it reached Round Peak from Virginia around 1900.[4] The Traditional Tune Archive also connects “Holly Ding” with “Holly Dink,” a call-and-response piece that Thomas W. Talley remembered from the Black community of middle Tennessee and printed in 1922.[4]
Recordings include Jarrell’s County albums Come and Go With Me and Sail Away Ladies (1976) and Kirk Sutphin’s Old Roots and New Branches (1994), and the tune is printed in Brody’s Fiddler’s Fakebook (1983).[2] The Peghead Nation lesson presents it in three parts, the second and third of them crooked.[3] None of the sources consulted here connects its melody to the familiar song “Cindy” (“Get Along Home, Cindy”).[5]
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