Banjo Pickin' Girl: A Song History

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The Traditional Ballad Index files "Banjo Pickin' Girl" under an older courting song, "Going Around the World" (Roud 11519).[1] The index traces the song family to an antecedent, "Baby Mine," published in 1859, and lists a 1929 recording of "Going Around the World" by R. D. Burnett and Lynn Woodard that was made for Gennett but never issued.[1] In the index's notes, one editor sets the Burnett and Woodard version against revival-era performances, which he hears as having "a much more feminist feel," and guesses that an all-woman group had lightly revised the song.[1] A second contributor identifies that group as Lily May Ledford's all-woman string band, the Coon Creek Girls, whose "Banjo-Pickin' Girl" the index lists on Vocalion 04413 and OKeh 04413, dated 1938; the same note adds that the song is now recorded far more often under that title.[1]

Nineteenth-century banjo with a wooden neck and calfskin head

William Esperance Boucher, Jr., Banjo, hardwood, calfskin, brass and iron, ca. 1845. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An early American banjo, shown for the song’s subject.

Ledford (1917-1985) came from a large family in Powell County, in eastern Kentucky.[2] In 1937 radio producer John Lair built the band around Ledford, her sister Rosie and two other musicians for his Renfro Valley Barn Dance, which broadcast first from Cincinnati and later from Renfro Valley in Rockcastle County, Kentucky.[2][3] The National Endowment for the Arts dates the band's broadcast debut to October 9, 1937, and John Lilly's history of the group gives that date for the first Renfro Valley Barn Dance broadcast, over Cincinnati's WLW.[3][4] Lilly writes that the women wanted to be called the Wildwood Flowers but that Lair preferred a more rustic name, and that he took them to Chicago in March 1938 to record for Vocalion.[4] On June 8, 1939, the band played at the White House in a program of American music, and Lilly describes the evening as a command performance hosted by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.[5][4] The printed program names "Lila May Ledford" as fiddle leader, with Violet Koehler on mandolin, Rosie Ledford on guitar, Daisy Lange on bass fiddle and Lair as director.[5]

Ledford received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985, the year of her death.[3] Berea College holds a collection documenting her career, including recordings of her performing at the college, and its description lists "Banjo Pickin' Girl" among the traditional songs it associates especially with her.[2]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Going Around the World (Banjo Pickin' Girl, Baby Mine)".
  2. Berea College Special Collections and Archives: "Lily May Ledford Collection".
  3. National Endowment for the Arts: "Lily May Ledford".
  4. Native Ground Books & Music: John Lilly, history of Lily May Ledford's all-woman string band (from The Old-Time Herald, Winter 1992/93).
  5. FDR Presidential Library: "A Program of American Music, The White House, June 8, 1939".