Old Aunt Jenny With Her Nightcap On: A Song History

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"Old Aunt Jenny with Her Nightcap On" is a title that had some currency in the American South, and according to the Traditional Tune Archive it has been attached to several different melodies.[1] One of them, printed in a 1940 collection under the shortened title "Old Aunt Jenny," is a two-part reel in G major that the archive considers a likely variant of "Dandy Jim from Caroline," a blackface minstrel song of about 1844.[1] Hans Nathan assigned its words, and possibly its music, to the minstrel performer Dan Emmett, though the archive cautions that Emmett may have adapted an existing folk tune rather than composed one.[2] The archive also hears a likeness between the low strain and the corresponding part of "Prettiest Girl in the County."[1]

Early twentieth-century photograph of an elderly woman in a white lace cap, seated and leaning on a table

“Elderly woman in lace cap leaning on table,” Detroit Publishing Co. photograph, between 1910 and 1930. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The title also turns up in Kentucky. Andy Cahan recorded the fiddler Clyde Davenport playing it in G, in standard fiddle tuning, on August 29, 1981, and that recording is preserved in the Slippery-Hill online archive of old-time fiddling.[3] Stephen Seifert includes the tune in his mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[4]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Old Aunt Jenny".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Dandy Jim from Caroline (1)".
  3. Slippery-Hill: "Old Aunt Jenny With Her Nightcap On" (Clyde Davenport).
  4. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".