Cripple Creek: A Song History

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Nobody knows for certain which Cripple Creek the tune is named for, and the two main candidates are both mining country.[1] One is the Cripple Creek area of Wythe County, Virginia, where iron ore was once dug from the valley and smelted in local furnaces.[1] Folk-music writer Mike Yates reported that most Virginia musicians link the tune to that spot.[2] A note with one version printed in the Journal of American Folklore likewise glossed Cripple Creek as a Virginia mining district.[3] The other candidate is Cripple Creek, Colorado, scene of a gold strike in the 1890s. Library of Congress notes on a field recording observe that no known version of the song or tune is older than that strike, and reason that the strike was probably its inspiration.[4] Folklorist Alan Jabbour also wondered whether the title might be connected to the Colorado district's labor unrest.[2] Neither theory has been proven.

Color photochrom panorama of the mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado, about 1900

Detroit Photographic Co., Cripple Creek, Colorado, photochrom, about 1900. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. This is the Colorado candidate; the tune may instead be named for Cripple Creek, Virginia.

Whatever its source, the tune became widespread in the twentieth century.[4] Fiddler Henry Reed told Jabbour that he first heard it around 1900, from a Texan in the coal country along the Tug Fork, where Reed and his brother were working. Jabbour recorded Reed playing it at the family home in Glen Lyn, Virginia, in 1967.[4] The English collector Cecil Sharp noted down a version called "Gone to Cripple Creek" during his 1917 Appalachian trip.[2] Vance Randolph later recorded Ozark fiddlers playing it for the Library of Congress in the early 1940s.[2] By 1924 it was being recorded commercially. One early recording was cut in New York on August 20, 1924, by a performer billed as "Stovepipe No. 1" (Sam Jones), who sang with guitar, harmonica and kazoo; "Sourwood Mountain" is listed as an additional title on the same recording, which Columbia issued as 201-D.[5] Fiddlin' Powers and Gid Tanner & Riley Puckett also recorded it that year, and Fiddlin' John Carson followed in 1927.[2]

The tune has been sung, used for play-parties and played for dances, and in the second half of the twentieth century bluegrass banjo versions carried it to new listeners.[4] Today it is a common first tune for beginning banjo players.[6] Among mountain dulcimer players, it appears in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, a book of popular tunes from the dulcimer jam tradition.[7]

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Sources

  1. Wikipedia: "Cripple Creek, Virginia".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Cripple Creek".
  3. American Battlefield Trust: "Cripple Creek".
  4. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "Cripple Creek" (Henry Reed, 1967).
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix 81938. Cripple Creek / Stovepipe No. 1".
  6. Peghead Nation: "Variations on 'Cripple Creek,' Part 1: Basic Version".
  7. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".