Cumberland Gap: A Song History

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The Cumberland Gap is a pass through the Appalachians where Kentucky meets Tennessee. Settlers bound for Kentucky passed through it on Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road, and the Traditional Tune Archive suggests that this history may have helped make the tune's title popular.[1] Fiddle scholar Alan Jabbour believed the melody went "well back" into the nineteenth century, but there seem to be no early printings and its ancestry is still unsettled.[1] Its verses vary a great deal. Some tell of exploring and settling the gap, and others turn to the Civil War, when Union general George W. Morgan's troops occupied the pass and later had to give it up. The chorus tells the boys to lie down and nap, with the gap still some miles off.[2]

Tinted 1862 lithograph of the Cumberland Gap seen from the south, with army tents spread across the valley floor

Middleton, Strobridge & Co., “View of Cumberland Gap, from the south,” tinted lithograph, 1862, showing the gap while held by U.S. forces under Gen. George W. Morgan. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

Vocalion recorded the tune in New York in June 1924 from fiddler Uncle Am Stuart of Morristown, Tennessee.[1][3][4] Land Norris and the team of Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett recorded it later that same year.[2] In January 1939, Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger recorded Wade Ward playing it in Galax, Virginia, for the Library of Congress.[5] Fiddler Edden Hammons gave a two-part version on a 1947 field recording.[6] Tommy Jarrell said the tune only reached the Round Peak area of North Carolina around 1915, when he was a young man.[1] His own setting is in D major.[7] The song also crossed the Atlantic: Lonnie Donegan's skiffle version reached number one on the UK singles chart in the spring of 1957.[8]

Fiddlers have played the tune in places as far apart as Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia, southwest Virginia and western North Carolina. Most versions are in G, though some are in A or D.[1] It is played as a dance tune throughout the Southeast.[2] Stephen Seifert includes it in his mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[9]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Cumberland Gap (1)".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Cumberland Gap".
  3. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UC Santa Barbara): "Vocalion matrix 13313. Cumberland Gap / Uncle "Am" Stuart".
  4. Internet Archive (Great 78 Project): "Cumberland Gap : Uncle "Am" Stuart".
  5. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "Cumberland Gap" (Wade Ward, Galax, Va., 1939).
  6. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Cumberland Gap (4)".
  7. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Cumberland Gap (3)".
  8. Official Charts: "Cumberland Gap" (Lonnie Donegan).
  9. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".