Jenny Run Away In The Mud In The Night: A Song History

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"Jenny Run Away In The Mud In The Night" is a reel in A major or Mixolydian that the Traditional Tune Archive files under the shorter title "Jenny Run Away in the Mud," listing fiddle tunings of EBeB, GDgd and AEae.[1] The Archive traces the tune to North Carolina fiddler Marcus Martin (1881–1974).[1] The Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, using the full title, counts it among the unusual tunes that today's old-time fiddlers have from Martin.[2] A native of Aquone, in Macon County, Martin learned from his fiddling father, Rowan Martin, later worked at the Beacon Mill in Swannanoa, and appeared year after year at Bascom Lamar Lunsford's Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville.[2]

Hand-colored print of a horseman on a wooded country road beside a river under a full moon

Currier & Ives, The Harvest Moon, hand-colored lithograph, 1857–71. A rider on a moonlit country road, shown for the night in the title; it has no connection to the tune.

The Archive cites a Library of Congress disc, AFS 07894 A, on which Artus Moser recorded Martin playing it at Swannanoa.[1] A 2019 Appalachian Studies Association paper dates Martin's recordings by Moser and by Alan Lomax to 1942, though its abstract names no individual tunes.[3] The Field Recorders' Collective, by contrast, says Library of Congress field workers first recorded him in the 1930s, so the sources consulted here differ on the date.[4] Printed settings appear in Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes, volume 1 (1994), from Peter Honig, and in the Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes (2011), from Martin.[1] The Archive also says that one line of the words sung to the tune is an altered form of the title of an older British Isles song, "Jockey to the Fair."[1]

In Simply Old Time Dulcimer, a tablature book of traditional old-time repertoire with demonstration audio, Don Pedi sets it in DAA tuning.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Jenny Run Away In The Mud In The Night"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Jenny Run Away in the Mud".
  2. Blue Ridge National Heritage Area: "Marcus Martin".
  3. Marshall Digital Scholar: "Most High Thing: Fiddle Music and the Aesthetics of Recording Technology in Appalachia".
  4. The Field Recorders' Collective: "Marcus Martin – FRC502".
  5. Don Pedi: "Simply Old Time Dulcimer".
  6. Image: Currier & Ives, The Harvest Moon, hand-colored lithograph, 1857–71. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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