Old Joe Clark: A Song History

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The sources consulted do not settle who the original Joe Clark was, and several candidates have been put forward.[1] The suggestion heard most often is Joseph Clark, born in Clay County, Kentucky, in 1839.[2] He married in 1857, served in the Union army during the Civil War, and afterward farmed, kept a small store and sold whiskey from his own still.[1][2] He was shot and killed near his store in the mid-1880s; the sources consulted differ on the year, with a Kentucky state historical marker giving 1885 and other accounts 1886.[1][2] The marker sums him up bluntly as a rough mountaineer with a great many enemies.[1] Other accounts tie the name to a Joe Clark in Virginia or to a murder case in Maryland, so the Kentucky connection remains a claim rather than an established fact.[1]

Marion Post Wolcott photograph of an old hand-hewn log cabin with a stone chimney near Jackson, Kentucky, 1940

Marion Post Wolcott, Old mountain cabin made of handhewn logs near Jackson, Breathitt County, Kentucky, photograph, 1940. Farm Security Administration collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. An eastern Kentucky cabin of the era; it is not connected to Joe Clark.

Folklorist Alan Jabbour found no trace of the tune in nineteenth-century printed collections or texts, and an early note in the Journal of American Folklore records it being sung in East Tennessee in 1905.[1] The English collector Cecil Sharp noted it down from Margaret Dodd in Virginia in 1918.[2] One fiddle lesson teaches it in A Mixolydian, a mode in which the G-sharp of an ordinary A major scale is flattened to G natural.[3] It reached records early. Fiddlin' John Carson recorded it for OKeh in New York on November 7, 1923, singing along with his fiddle.[4] On August 18, 1924, the Virginia family band Fiddlin' Powers & Family recorded it for Victor.[5] According to the Traditional Tune Archive, that disc was the third best-selling country record of 1924, and a 1926 version by the Skillet Lickers of north Georgia ranked fourth for its year.[1] Vance Randolph later recorded Ozark fiddlers playing it for the Library of Congress in the early 1940s.[1]

The Tune Archive calls it the quintessential old-time fiddle tune, while noting that it most often serves as a learner's piece and a first step into the music.[1] One beginning fiddle course describes it as a tune every fiddler needs to know.[3] Among mountain dulcimer players, it appears in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, a book of 75 popular tunes from the mountain dulcimer jamming tradition.[6]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Old Joe Clark".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "Old Joe Clark (Roud 3594)".
  3. Peghead Nation: "Old Joe Clark, Part 1".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "OKeh matrix S-72016. Fare you well, old Joe Clark / Fiddlin' John Carson".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-30582. Old Joe Clark / Fiddlin' Powers & Family".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".