Little Birdie: A Song History

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"Little Birdie" is a bird-themed song found across the American South and the Appalachians. It is often made up of floating verses, yet the Traditional Ballad Index reads its underlying story as one of adultery, in which a woman's husband turns up unexpectedly.[1] The Index gives 1909 as its earliest date, from the Frank C. Brown collection of North Carolina folklore, whose editors filed many of their texts under "Kitty Kline" because those texts mention that name.[1] It also shares floating lines with "East Virginia" ("Dark Hollow").[1] Folklorist Mark Wilson has offered only a guess about its origin: that it grew out of some sentimental nineteenth-century piece.[2]

Japanese woodblock print of a long-tailed bird perched on a flowering plum branch

Utagawa Hiroshige, Bird on a Plum Branch, woodblock print; ink and color on paper. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

The song reached records early: Land Norris recorded it for OKeh in 1925, and Vernon Dalhart, under the name Al Craver, recorded it for Columbia the same year.[1] Holland Puckett (as Robert Howell) and John Hammond followed in 1927, and in 1938 the Coon Creek Girls recorded it for Vocalion while Pete Steele was recorded performing it for the Library of Congress folk song archive.[1] The Stanley Brothers recorded it for Rich-R-Tone in 1952.[1] In the folk revival, Pete Seeger said he had learned it from a recording by Lily May Ledford of the Coon Creek Girls, and later recordings of Steele's own setting were issued by Folkways and Yazoo.[2] Roscoe Holcomb's versions appear on several Smithsonian Folkways releases, and Frank Proffitt sang it for Sandy Paton shortly before his death in 1965.[2]

Paton considered the song widespread throughout the Appalachians.[2] Lorinda Jones includes it in Traditional Playing Of The Mountain Dulcimer, a book of 22 traditional songs for mountain dulcimer in DAA tuning, with tablature, chords and play-along tracks, published by Fingers Of Steel.[3]

Our books that contain the song "Little Birdie"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index (Waltz and Engle): "Little Birdie".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "Little Birdie".
  3. Fingers Of Steel: "Lorinda Jones, Traditional Playing Of The Mountain Dulcimer".
  4. Image: Utagawa Hiroshige, Bird on a Plum Branch, woodblock print; ink and color on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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