Citico: A Song History
Citico is an East Tennessee place name. Two creeks carry it, and so do two Native American archaeological sites, one in Monroe County and one inside present-day Chattanooga.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive files the tune under the spelling "Citaco," with "Citico" and "Citigo" as variants, and locates Citaco north and east of Chattanooga.[2] None of the sources consulted here says which Citico gave the tune its name, or who named it.
Detroit Publishing Co., “Bluffs of the Tennessee River, Chattanooga, Tenn.,” photograph, between 1900 and 1920. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
The archive associates the tune chiefly with north Georgia, while noting that it also circulated among Tennessee and North Carolina fiddlers. Lowe Stokes (1898–1983), a Georgia fiddler who played with the Skillet Lickers, learned it as "Down to the Wildwood to Shoot the Buffalo." When his band, Lowe Stokes' Swamp Rooters, recorded it for Brunswick in 1930, the record carried the title "Citaco," and Stokes fiddled it in GDad cross-tuning.[2] Jane Keefer's index of recorded folk music dates that session to November 12, 1930, and lists its LP reissue on County's Old Time Fiddle Classics, Vol. 2 (1973).[3] In 1942 Artus Moser made a field recording of it by the western North Carolina fiddler Marcus Martin (1881–1974). According to the archive, Martin's version resembles the Kentucky tune "Calico," and some other versions come close to "Cotton Eyed Joe."[2]
The tune kept turning up on later recordings. Keefer's index lists Eldia Barbee's "Old Citaco" (Pine Breeze, 1976), a 1977 Barbee Brothers performance on the Tennessee Folklore Society's Tennessee: The Folk Heritage, Vol. 2, and a 1993 version by Dirk Powell, John Herrmann and Tom Sauber on One Eyed Dog.[3] Martin's 1942 field recording was issued by the Field Recorders' Collective in 2015.[2]
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