Johnson Boys: A Song History

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"Johnson Boys" is a comic Southern mountain song in the tall-tale vein: it boasts of the half-wild Johnson boys and their outsized feats with guns, fiddles and farm work, while making it plain that they have no idea how to court a girl.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index files it as Roud 6676 and dates the earliest text it indexes to 1922, from the Frank C. Brown collection of North Carolina folklore.[1] Its deeper origins are uncertain. Paul Clayton described it as an old humorous courting song, and Gus Meade thought it was adapted from an Irish song, "Doran's Ass," of around 1860; the Traditional Tune Archive points out, however, that no pre-1900 version has turned up.[2]

Winslow Homer wood engraving of a young man reading in an armchair while a young woman sits watching him

Winslow Homer, “You Are Really Picturesque, My Love”, wood engraving published in The Galaxy, 1868. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An awkward courtship scene of the era; it has no connection to the song.

Collectors found the song in the Southern mountains. It appears in Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Lamar Stringfield's 30 and 1 Folk Songs from the Southern Mountains, in Alan Lomax's The Folk Songs of North America, and in the collection of Frank and Anne Warner, who took it down from the banjo player and singer Frank Proffitt, in a version dated 1941.[1][3] Proffitt's performance was later included on Smithsonian Folkways' Classic Banjo anthology.[4] The first commercial recording was made in 1927 by Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters for Brunswick, and the Grant Brothers of Tennessee recorded it for Columbia in 1928.[2][1] Hopkins's band also recorded as the Hill Billies, the name it used on Vocalion, and the 1927 "Johnson Boys" was later reissued on a County LP titled Hill Billies.[5][3] The title also turns up in a list of traditional Ozark fiddle tunes published by folklorist Vance Randolph in 1954.[2]

"Johnson Boys" lives a double life as a song and as an instrumental, generally played in the key of D.[2] Field recordings caught it as a fiddle-and-banjo piece from Buna and Viola Hicks of Beech Mountain, North Carolina, in the early 1960s, and the banjo players Wade Ward and Kyle Creed were both recorded playing it.[6][3] The folk revival took it up too, with recordings by the Weavers and the New Lost City Ramblers.[3] In bluegrass, Flatt & Scruggs recorded a version titled "The Legend of the Johnson Boys" in March 1962 and made it the opening track of their Columbia album Folk Songs of Our Land that year.[7][8] For mountain dulcimer players, its place in the jam repertoire is marked by its inclusion in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam collection.[9]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Johnson Boys".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Johnson Boys".
  3. The Folk Music Index (ibiblio): "Johns to Joy".
  4. Smithsonian Folkways: "Johnson Boys" (Frank Proffitt, Classic Banjo from Smithsonian Folkways).
  5. Document Records: "The Hill Billies / Al Hopkins & His Buckle Busters - Complete Recorded Works 1925-1928 Vol 1 (1925-1926)".
  6. Smithsonian Folkways: "Johnson Boys" (Buna and Viola Hicks, The Traditional Music of Beech Mountain, North Carolina, Vol. 2).
  7. Wikipedia: "Folk Songs of Our Land".
  8. SecondHandSongs: "The Legend of the Johnson Boys" (Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs).
  9. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Harmony Edition".