Lazy John: A Song History

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The old-time fiddle tune "Lazy John" comes from the playing of Clyde Davenport, a fiddler born in 1921 who grew up in Wayne County, Kentucky, on the Cumberland Plateau.[1][2] Davenport, who received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992, was largely self-taught and built his first fiddle from barn boards at the age of nine.[2] He sang the piece as well as fiddling it, in G with the fiddle in standard tuning, and told folklorist Jeff Titon that he had learned it from the radio, perhaps from a record by Johnnie Lee Wills.[1][3] Wills, a brother of Bob Wills, led a western swing band,[4] and Decca issued his "Lazy John," credited to Wills and Henry Boatman, on a 78 dated 1947.[5][4] If that record was indeed what he heard, the fiddle tune reached Kentucky from a 1940s western swing record by way of the radio.

1940 photograph of a man in a rocking chair with his small daughter on his lap, tuning a large floor radio

Russell Lee, “John Frost and daughter listening to radio in their home, Tehama County, California,” photograph, November 1940. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

A 1990 concert recording of Davenport playing it is held at Berea College, and the college's Appalachian Center included the tune on his album Puncheon Camps (1992).[1] Later recordings by revival fiddlers include Brad Leftwich's Say Old Man (1996), Bruce Molsky's Soon Be Time (2006) and April Verch's That's How We Run (2011).[1] Molsky, who teaches it online, traces his version through Davenport back to the Wills record.[4] The Traditional Tune Archive treats it as distinct from "Sleepy-Eyed John," with only a slight resemblance in the chorus.[1] The tune also appears in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[6]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Lazy John".
  2. National Endowment for the Arts: "Clyde Davenport".
  3. Field Recorders' Collective: "Clyde Davenport".
  4. Peghead Nation: "Lazy John".
  5. Internet Archive (Great 78 Project): "Lazy John : Johnnie Lee Wills And His Boys".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".