Killy Kranky: A Song History
"Killy Kranky" is a play-party piece, a dancing game whose players supplied their own singing, and the Traditional Ballad Index reports it from the Appalachians and the Midwest.[1] Jean Ritchie, born in 1922 in Viper, Kentucky, the youngest of fourteen children, grew up in a family whose songs and games were part of daily life, and she counted the relative she called "Uncle Jason," her father's first cousin, as its richest source of songs.[2] She learned "Killy Kranky" from him and printed it, words and tune, in her autobiographical songbook Singing Family of the Cumberlands and again in Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians.[1][2] As Ritchie described it, the players sang while they "wound the grapevine," and Uncle Jason insisted the game was really just a pretext for the dancers to embrace.[1]
Jean-Baptiste Pater, The Fair at Bezons, oil on canvas, about 1733. Couples dancing in a ring at a country fair, shown for the play-party dancing the song went with; it has no connection to the song.
The Traditional Ballad Index files the song under Roud 2572 together with the Scottish "Killiecrankie," and gives its earliest date as 1790, from Johnson's Museum, for which, according to a note the Index quotes, Burns reworked an old fragment of the Scots song.[1] Its editor has no doubt that the title comes from the Battle of Killiecrankie of 1689, the Jacobite victory in which Viscount Dundee was killed, though he notes that Ritchie's words have drifted a long way and that her melody is unlike both of the "Killiecrankie" tunes he is familiar with.[1] Other spellings turn up elsewhere, "Kilamakrankie" in Wolford's The Play-Party in Indiana and "Killima Crankie" in a collection from Morning Sun, Iowa, while a Mississippi text in Hudson's collection, which the editor says is not a play-party, plainly comes from a Scots original.[1] A separate Newfoundland song, the humorous "The Girl of Killy Kranky," puts the name to a different use; the Ballad Index lists a recording of it by Cyril O'Brien in the MUNFLA-Leach collection and gives its earliest date as 1951.[3]
Aubrey Atwater, who publishes the book herself, sets "Killy Kranky" for DAA tuning in Song By Song, Vol. II, her dulcimer tablature collection of traditional songs drawn from artists, songwriters and composers, with words included for many of them.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Killy Kranky".
- Library of Congress, Folklife Today: "Jean Ritchie, 1922-2015".
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Girl of Killy Kranky".
- Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. II".
- Image: Jean-Baptiste Pater, The Fair at Bezons, oil on canvas, about 1733. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.