Jenny In The Cotton Patch: A Song History

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"Jenny In The Cotton Patch" is an American reel that the Traditional Tune Archive assigns to Kentucky and Tennessee, set in A Mixolydian with the fiddle retuned to AEae or GDgd.[1] The Archive traces it to Clyde Davenport (born 1921) of Monticello in south-central Kentucky, who had it from his father, Will Davenport, who in turn learned it from Will Phipps, an old-timer from Rock Creek, Tennessee, whom the Archive lists as born in 1812.[1] Davenport grew up on a family farm in Wayne County and took up the fiddle without lessons, playing his father's tunes from memory.[2]

Old photograph of a broad, calm river with a wooded hill on the far bank

George N. Barnard, View on Tennessee River, albumen print, about 1864. The Tennessee River, shown for the Tennessee fiddler the tune is traced to; it has no connection to the tune.

The tune appears on several Davenport albums: Monticello, shared with fiddler W. L. Gregory and issued by Davis Unlimited in 1974; Clydeoscope on County in 1986; and Puncheon Camps, issued by Berea College's Appalachian Center in 1990.[1][2] Jeff Titon visited and recorded Davenport from 1990 onward, and the Field Recorders' Collective notes hear in this tune an old-fashioned style of drones and double stops made possible by "cross key" tuning.[2] Sources differ on the key: the Archive gives A Mixolydian, while the Collective's notes place Davenport's version in G with the fiddle tuned GDgd.[1][2] Titon printed it in Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (2001), where he places it in the "Granny Will Your Dog Bite?" and "Betty Martin" tune family, and it also appears in the Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes (2011).[1] The Archive points to "Huldy in the Sinkhole" as a closely related Kentucky tune, and the sources consulted here give no alternate titles for this one.[1]

Don Pedi presents it in two versions, one in DGD and one in DAD tuning, in Bound To Have A Little Fun!, a 63-page book of his mountain dulcimer transcriptions that he publishes himself and that comes with an MP3 of each tune.[3]

Our book that contains the song "Jenny In The Cotton Patch"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Jenny in the Cotton Patch (1)".
  2. Field Recorders' Collective: "Clyde Davenport".
  3. Don Pedi: "Bound To Have A Little Fun!".
  4. Image: George N. Barnard, View on Tennessee River, albumen print, about 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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