Love Somebody: A Song History

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"Love Somebody" is a reel that also has words. Longer titles such as "I Love Somebody, Yes I Do" are also found.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive finds old antecedents for the melody in Britain. Sets titled "Miss Farquharson's Reel" were printed in London by Robert Bremner (Scots Reels, 1757) and by the Thompsons, and the Northumbrian musician William Vickers wrote it into his 1770 manuscript as "My Lover's Butt a Lady Yett."[1] The words were collected too. Thomas Talley included it in his collection of African American folk rhymes, and versions appear in Perrow's Songs and Rhymes from the South (1915).[1]

Painting of a young man teaching a young woman to play the flute in a parlor

John George Brown, The Music Lesson, oil on canvas, 1870. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The title does not always mean the same melody. According to the Tune Archive, some singers set the words to a tune close to "Soldier's Joy" and others to one closer to "My Love Is But a Lassie Yet."[1] The east Kentucky fiddler John Salyer, for example, played a "Love Somebody" that is a form of "Soldier's Joy," preserved on recordings his sons made in 1941–42.[2] The earliest recordings under this title that the Tune Archive lists are by Uncle Dave Macon with Sid Harkreader (Vocalion, 1924), and from 1928 by the Crook Brothers Barn Dance Orchestra (Victor) and Luke Highnight's Ozark Strutters.[1] The historian Charles Wolfe wrote that middle Tennessee fiddlers favored it and that Grand Ole Opry audiences heard it often in the 1920s and 1930s.[1] A fragment of the tune played by the Virginia fiddler Henry Reed is held in the Library of Congress’s Henry Reed Collection.[3]

The title also turns up in the dulcimer tradition. On August 24, 1942, Alan Lomax and George Pullen Jackson recorded Effie Wilson playing a piece listed as "Love Somebody" on the dulcimer at Marrowbone, Kentucky, for the Library of Congress.[4] In 1957 Jean Ritchie sang "Love Somebody, Yes I Do" with her dulcimer on the Folkways album Children's Songs and Games from the Southern Mountains.[5]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Love Somebody (2)".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Love Somebody (1)".
  3. Library of Congress: "Love Somebody (fragment)" (Henry Reed Collection).
  4. Library of Congress: "Love somebody (on dulcimer)" (Traditional Music and Spoken Word Card Catalog).
  5. Smithsonian Folkways: "Love Somebody, Yes I Do" (Jean Ritchie).