Cindy: A Song History

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The Traditional Tune Archive (TTA) calls "Cindy" a widely known frolic tune, one familiar from folk collections and from school songbooks of earlier generations alike, and it lists names such as "Get Along Home, Cindy," "Cindy in the Meadows," "Git Along Cindy" and "Run Along Home, Sandy."[1] The sources consulted here name no author or birthplace for it. The verses TTA prints wander from courting to travel and parting.[1] The Library of Congress recorded Mississippi fiddler John A. Brown playing it in 1939, and the folklorist Vance Randolph included the title in a list of traditional Ozark fiddle tunes published in 1954.[1]

Black-and-white photograph of couples dancing a square dance at the Mountain Music Festival in Asheville, North Carolina

Square dance team at the Mountain Music Festival, Asheville, North Carolina, photograph, between 1938 and 1950. Lomax Collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The tune reached records early. Samantha Bumgarner and Eva Davis included "Cindy in the Meadows" in their April 1924 Columbia session,[2] a title TTA files with "Cindy."[1] On January 15, 1925, a string band of musicians from North Carolina and Virginia, among them Al Hopkins and Tony Alderman, recorded it as "Old Time Cinda" for OKeh in New York.[1][3] When producer Ralph Peer asked for the group's name, Hopkins reportedly called them "a bunch of hill billies from North Carolina and Virginia," and Peer named the band The Hill Billies.[4] TTA, citing the historian Tony Russell, counts that record among the first made by musicians who described themselves as hillbillies.[3] Between 1927 and 1934, Pope's Arkansas Mountaineers, Fiddlin' John Carson and Gid Tanner's Skillet Lickers all recorded their own versions.[1]

Most versions are in D, played in standard or ADae tuning, though some fiddlers, Brad Leftwich among them, play it in A with the fiddle in AEae.[1] Other recordings include ones by Hobart Smith and the New Lost City Ramblers, and the tune is printed in fiddle collections such as Brody's Fiddler's Fakebook (1983).[1] Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II includes it.[5]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Cindy (1)".
  2. Native Ground Books & Music: "Samantha Bumgarner: The Original Banjo Pickin' Girl".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Old Time Cinda".
  4. Archives Center, National Museum of American History (Smithsonian): "Guide to the Tony Alderman Country Music Collection".
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".