Dance All Night: A Song History
"Dance All Night" is both a song and a fiddle tune. It has been found across West Virginia, Virginia, western North Carolina, north Georgia and Alabama, and as far west as Nebraska. It also goes by "Dance All Night with a Bottle in Your Hand" and "Give the Fiddler a Dram."[1] Most fiddlers play it in G major in standard tuning, but versions differ in how many parts they have and how those parts are repeated.[1] The collector Guthrie Meade heard some kinship with "Buffalo Gals." The tune "Jawbone" shares some of its melody and some of its verses.[1]
Adriaen van Ostade, The Dance in the Inn, etching, 1652. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers recorded it for Columbia in 1926, and folklorist Art Rosenbaum notes that their record was very influential, especially in Georgia. The Tweedy Brothers followed on Gennett in 1928, and Alabama's Stripling Brothers on Vocalion in 1929.[1] Rosenbaum's own source, the Georgian Lawrence Eller, learned it through his family, and Rosenbaum reads the words, apparently because of a floating verse about hanging Jefferson Davis, as a sign of Unionist feeling in parts of the southern Appalachians.[1] Other floating verses describe dancing with a bottle in hand, a jawbone left on a fence, a girl in a red or blue dress, and calls for the fiddler to get a drink.[1]
Later fiddlers and revival bands kept it in circulation. West Virginia's Clark Kessinger recorded it for Folkways and County, and Tommy Jarrell recorded it for County.[1] Tennessee fiddler Arthur Smith's version appears on the Smithsonian Folkways album Milk 'Em in the Evening Blues.[2] Wade Mainer, the Highwoods String Band, Sandy Bradley, and Dan Gellert with Brad Leftwich all recorded it too, and it is printed in collections such as Brody's Fiddler's Fakebook (1983).[1] It is also part of Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[3]
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