Kittypuss: A Song History

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"Kitty Puss" is an old-time fiddle tune of Kentucky, Tennessee and the wider South. The Traditional Tune Archive hears an archaic quality in it and notes that it circulated widely through Appalachia and the Southern states under many different names; record producers Mark Wilson and Guthrie Meade went so far as to call it "one of the oddest Southern fiddle tunes on record."[1] The Slippery-Hill archive of fiddle recordings classes Buddy Thomas's version, played in G in standard tuning, among its "crooked" tunes.[2] The Archive's list of regional names shows how far it travelled: Clyde Davenport in south-central Kentucky knew it as "Puncheon Camps," Estill Bingham of Bell County, Kentucky, as "Homemade Sugar," Gaither Carleton and Doc Watson in North Carolina as "Tucker's Old Barn," and Norman Edmonds of Virginia as "Old Time Mockingbird." The same source points to an early trace of the title: "Poor Little Kitty Puss" appears on a list of 350 tune and song titles gathered in 1915 for a class at the Normal School in Berea, Kentucky.[1]

Currier & Ives print of two white kittens upsetting a cup and lapping spilled milk on a cushion

Currier & Ives, My Little White Kitties – Into Mischief, hand-colored lithograph, 1857–71. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown in fun for the kitty of the title; it has no connection to the tune.

The name "Kitty Puss" is tied above all to Buddy Thomas of Lewis County in northeastern Kentucky, who had it from his grandfather, passed down to him through his mother's whistling.[1] Wilson and Meade recorded Thomas, with Leona Stamm on guitar, in Ashland, Kentucky, and Waldorf, Maryland, in 1973 and 1974, and Rounder issued the results in 1976 as Kitty Puss: Old-Time Fiddle Music from Kentucky.[3] Thomas did not live to see it: he died at 39, a few months after the sessions.[3][4] Writing about Roger Cooper, a younger fiddler whom Thomas taught and encouraged, Mike Yates portrays Thomas as a man who grew up very poor in a remote part of the county and whose playing happened mostly in friends' homes and at small gatherings rather than on stage.[4] John Harrod ranked Thomas above every other fiddler he and his companions heard, holding him up as proof that a great player can innovate without abandoning the old ways;[5] Harrod himself recorded Kentucky fiddlers from 1970 to 1990.[6]

Thomas was far from the only Kentuckian to play it. The Traditional Tune Archive also lists Owen "Snake" Chapman of Pike County, Clyde Davenport of Wayne County (who learned it from Will Phipps of Rock Creek, Tennessee, and included it on a 1986 County album), Estill Bingham and Everett Kays among its tradition bearers, and the tune has been printed in Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994), from Tennessee fiddler Charlie Acuff, and in the Milliner-Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes (2011).[1]

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Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Kitty Puss (1)".
  2. Slippery-Hill: "Kitty Puss" (Buddy Thomas).
  3. Traditional Tune Archive: "Kitty Puss: Old Time Fiddle Music From Kentucky".
  4. Musical Traditions: "Roger Cooper: Essence of Old Kentucky" (review by Mike Yates).
  5. Musical Traditions: "Along the Ohio's Shores, Vol. 1" (review by Scott Prouty).
  6. Berea College Archives: "John Harrod Kentucky Fiddle Music Collection".