Briar Picker Brown: A Song History
"Briar Picker Brown," usually spelled "Briarpicker Brown" in fiddle sources, is a D-major reel associated with Kentucky and Ohio.[1] It is best known from Kentucky fiddler Buddy Thomas, who learned it from Morris Allen, an older fiddler in Portsmouth, Ohio.[1] Mark Wilson and Gus Meade recorded Thomas in 1973 and 1974, in Waldorf, Maryland, and Ashland, Kentucky, and the tune appears on Kitty Puss: Old Time Fiddle Music from Kentucky, which Rounder released in 1976.[2] That album was his only commercial release; Thomas died of a heart attack in October 1974, aged 39.[2] A recording of Allen playing the tune himself was later released on the Field Recorders' Collective set Along the Ohio's Shores (2020).[3]
Winslow Homer, Gathering Berries, wood engraving from Harper’s Weekly, July 11, 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
None of the sources consulted here settles where the name comes from. The Traditional Tune Archive supposes it refers to briars picked up while hunting, and adds that a related word was once a disparaging label for Kentuckians and West Virginians who moved north to work in Ohio's factories.[1] In shape the tune resembles "Everyone to the Puncheon," played by West Virginia fiddler Clark Kessinger, who was a friend of Morris Allen. Folklorist Jeff Titon has noted that its low part matches the English country-dance tune "The Rose Tree."[1] Later recordings include ones by Norman Blake on Rounder and by Malcolm Dalglish and Grey Larsen on Flying Fish (1982).[1] It is also in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[4]
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