Little Dutch Girl: A Song History
In the sources consulted here, "Little Dutch Girl" turns up as an Ozarks fiddle tune, and the Traditional Tune Archive actually separates two different melodies under the name, both connected with the Collins family of fiddlers[1][2]. The one revival fiddlers usually play at jams is a reel, generally given in A, which the Archive counts among the favourites of old-time sessions. Drew Beisswenger and Gordon McCann's Ozarks Fiddle Music (2008) reports that Earl Collins and fellow Missouri fiddler Bob Holt both heard it played in Douglas County, Missouri, when they were young; Collins recorded it on his 1975 album That's Earl, and Marion Thede had already printed a version from Oklahoma fiddler Joe Wilsie in The Fiddle Book (1967) as "Liza Jane No. 3"[2].
George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, oil on canvas, 1845. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A Missouri river scene shown for its setting; it has no connection to the tune.
Collins, a Douglas County native of 1911, grew up sharecropping in Oklahoma after his family moved there in 1917, and went west to Los Angeles in 1935. He laid the fiddle down in 1949, picked it up again at his sons' urging in 1965, and from then until his death in 1975 was a leading figure at California's old-time contests and jam sessions[3]. The second, less-played tune came from his father, W. S. Collins of Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma, by way of Thede. She suggested it began in Dutchtown, Missouri, though the Tune Archive points out that she gave no evidence, and that "Dutch" in such titles could simply mean a girl of German descent[1]. A stray sung verse travels with the reel[2], but in the sources consulted no separate ballad of this title was found, nor any documented link to the children's clapping rhyme about a little Dutch girl.
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