Bob Tailed Mule: A Song History

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In the sources consulted here, the tune documented as “Bob Tailed Mule” is an old-time breakdown in A associated with the Arizona fiddler Kenner C. Kartchner of Snowflake.[1][2] Fiddlers may play it in standard tuning or cross-tuned to AEae, and its opening strain is ten bars long rather than the customary eight.[1] A 1943 recording of Kartchner playing it survives,[3] and in another entry the Traditional Tune Archive says his family recorded him at home that year.[4] The Archive gives “Buckin’ Dun” as an alternative title for the tune, yet it also gives “Buckin’ Dun” an entry of its own, drawn from a different page of Kartchner’s transcriptions and never mentioning the mule, so the naming is unsettled.[1][5] The sources consulted here record no earlier history for the tune, and the Archive leaves open whether it is related to a breakdown called “Bobtail Hoss.”[2]

Photograph of men beside a mule held in a wooden shoeing frame at an army camp

G. W. Foster, Mule Stock, Camp Nelson, Kentucky, albumen silver print, 1863–64. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.

Kartchner’s grandson Larry V. Shumway compiled and edited his journals into an autobiography, Frontier Fiddler, which the University of Arizona Press published in 1990.[3][6] Reviewing it in Folklore Forum, Gregory Hansen admired its account of where and how fiddling fit into Southwestern life, and he singled out the book’s seventeen tune transcriptions as a valuable resource.[6] The tune is printed there as “Bobtailed Mule,”[2] and a version credited to Shumway appears in the first volume of Phillips’s Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994).[1] Jim and Kim Lansford, who learned it from a 1943 field recording of Kartchner, released it on their 2003 album Call Your Dogs.[1]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Bob Tailed Mule".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Bobtailed Mule".
  3. Slippery-Hill.com: "Bob Tailed Mule" (K.C. Kartchner, 1943).
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Sweets o' Weaver".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Buckin' Dun".
  6. Folklore Forum 27:1 (1996), via IU ScholarWorks: "Book Reviews" (Gregory Hansen on Frontier Fiddler).