Old Yellow Dog: A Song History
"Old Yeller Dog," sometimes given the longer title "Came Trottin' Through the Meeting House," is an old-time fiddle reel, usually played in G in two repeated parts. The Traditional Tune Archive traces it to the East Tennessee fiddler Charlie Acuff (1919–2013), who had it from his grandfather and namesake, the man who first taught him to fiddle; it has since been printed in Stacy Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994) and the third volume of The Portland Collection (2015), and fiddler Rayna Gellert plays it cross-tuned in F.[1] The Tennessee Arts Commission's folklife program remembers Acuff, a Union County native who spent some forty years at the Alcoa aluminum plant, as one of the region's best-loved musicians; his recordings include the CD Better Times a-Comin' (2000), and he received a Tennessee Folklife Heritage Award in 2005.[2]
Rosa Bonheur, A Limier Briquet Hound, oil on canvas, ca. 1856. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its hound; it has no connection to the tune.
The Tune Archive classes the tune as a variant of the "Old Grey Mare" family, which circulated on the blackface minstrel stage as "Down in Alabam" and also supplied a campaign song for Abraham Lincoln.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index dates that family's earliest text to an 1838 description of a Virginia plantation dance, where it was sung by enslaved people, and notes 1858 sheet music credited to J. Warner.[3] A related early country record is Earl Johnson and his Clodhoppers' "Old Grey Mare Kicking Out of the Wilderness," made for OKeh on 7 October 1927 (OKeh 45183).[4] In the sources consulted here, no early field or commercial recording under the "Old Yeller Dog" title was found.
The title is less fanciful than it sounds. As the Tune Archive points out, dogs did once follow their owners to worship: in the late eighteenth century the South Carolina minister Charles Woodmason had to forbid churchgoers to bring their animals along, and James Hall's Travels in Scotland (1807) describes dogs disturbing services in the Highlands.[1]
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