Granny Will Your Dog Bite: A Song History
"Granny Will Your Dog Bite" is less a single tune than a title shared by several, and the Traditional Tune Archive lists at least three different melodies under it.[1][2][3] The one the Archive treats as popular and far-reaching is a reel, usually in A (sometimes D) and often fiddled in AEae cross-tuning, documented from Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.[1] Its words turn on a floating question-and-answer verse about whether granny's dog will bite, and other verses put the same question to other farmyard creatures.[1] The line is old. Bruce Baker found it in a Civil War memoir by J. A. Bush Sr., held in the North Carolina State Archives, describing a fifer named D. A. Griffin. In Baker's reading, the passage shows that the melody suited the fife and that the rhyme was already known in Caldwell County, North Carolina, during the first years of the war.[1]
Jack Delano, “Iola Smith and her dog walking through a field on the Smith farm in Carroll County, Georgia,” photograph, April 1941. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
Crockett's Kentucky Mountaineers made a commercial recording of it in 1928, and the Tune Archive also lists 78s by the Virginia Ramblers (Timely Tunes, 1931) and the Floyd County Ramblers (Victor, 1933).[1] In the early 1940s, folklorist Vance Randolph recorded it from Ozark fiddlers for the Library of Congress, including Arkansas fiddler Lon Jordan in 1941. Around 1975, John Harrod recorded John Masters of Lexington, Kentucky, playing it.[1] The Archive's list of recordings also includes fiddlers Melvin Wine, Bob Walters of Nebraska and Dwight Lamb.[1]
A separate D-major tune with this title comes from southwestern Pennsylvania. Samuel Bayard noted it from fifer Hiram Horner in 1961 and traced related settings to Elias Howe's Diamond School for the Violin (about 1867). It closely resembles a "Camptown Hornpipe" in William Sidney Mount's mid-nineteenth-century manuscripts, and the Tune Archive notes that an alternate title found in Thomas Briggs' 1855 banjo instructor may point to minstrel-stage origins.[2] Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer book Join the Jam II contains two settings under this title, numbered I and II.[4]
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