Old Jaw Bone: A Song History

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"Old Jaw Bone" is a blackface minstrel song; the Traditional Tune Archive dates its first printing to Boston in 1840 and notes Robert Winans's suggestion that Joel Sweeney may have written it.[1] The title names a real instrument, an animal's jawbone sounded by scraping a key or strip of metal across its teeth, which was played in nineteenth-century African American music and taken up by minstrel troupes.[1][2] Accounts of the song's origin differ, however: Hans Nathan traced it to Black banjo players in 1830s Tennessee.[3] The JUBA Project, which documents early minstrelsy in Britain, lists George Harrington performing it with the Ethiopian Serenaders in London in 1846.[3] A setting also appears in the 1851 printing of Elias Howe's Complete Preceptor for the Banjo, a later edition of what the Archive calls the earliest known banjo tutor, first issued in 1848.[1]

An animal's lower jawbone with its teeth, used as a scraped percussion instrument

Jawbone, bone, 19th century. A jawbone of the kind scraped as a rhythm instrument, shown for the title; it has no connection to the song.

An old-time fiddle tune called "Jawbone" also survives; the Archive reports Charles Wolfe's view that it has minstrel roots, but the sources consulted here do not show whether its melody descends from "Old Jaw Bone."[2] Library of Congress collectors recorded the tune at points from Florida to Ohio before the Second World War, and fiddle collections print versions from Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, and from Alan Jabbour with the Hollow Rock String Band.[2] Pope's Arkansas Mountaineers recorded "Jawbone" for Victor in Memphis on February 6, 1928, with John H. Chism on fiddle, and the Discography of American Historical Recordings lists Chism as its composer.[4] Mark Gilston includes "Old Jaw Bone" among the old-time pieces in More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, a sheet-music book he publishes himself, with each tune also supplied as a separate PDF; the listing does not say which of these melodies his version follows.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Old Jaw Bone"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Old Jaw Bone (2)".
  2. Traditional Tune Archive: "Jawbone" (annotation).
  3. The JUBA Project (University of Toronto): "Old Jaw Bone, The".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-41859. Jawbone / Pope's Arkansas Mountaineers".
  5. Mark Gilston: "More American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer".
  6. Image: Jawbone, bone, 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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