On Top Of Old Smoky: A Song History

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The Traditional Ballad Index gives the author of "On Top of Old Smoky" as unknown and lists versions from Appalachia and across the American South, Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.[1] The oldest dated text in that index is from 1859, in a songster called Unsworth's Burnt Cork Lyrics, where lines from the song lead into added comic verses, and the index also notes that certain key lines appear earlier in several British texts.[1] The song is sometimes treated as one with "The Wagoner's Lad," but the Index argues that the two have different plots and tunes and that the merger seems to come from the Lomaxes' editing.[1][2]

Black-and-white photograph of a road winding along a steep wooded mountainside, with ridges fading into the distance

Marion Post Wolcott, Winding road and general landscape. Smokey Mountains, North Carolina, photograph, 1939. Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. Shown for its setting; no source ties the song to this spot.

A version sung by Memory Shelton at Alleghany, North Carolina, on 29 July 1916 begins with Old Smokey, and Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp printed it in 1917 as the first variant of "The Wagoner's Lad" in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.[3] Smithsonian Folkways names George Reneau's disc on Vocalion 15366 as the first recording and dates it 1925, while the Ballad Index dates the same disc 1926.[4][1] According to the Folkways notes, the Weavers' version on Decca 27515 became one of the group's biggest hits of 1951 and spent many weeks at number two on the Billboard charts; on it Pete Seeger called out each line ahead of the singers, as frontier songleaders did.[4] That same year Folkways Music Publishers issued sheet music with the Weavers on the cover, crediting Seeger with new words and the arrangement.[5][4] Seeger said he learned the song from someone in the Smoky Mountains and claimed that "Certain verses go back to Elizabethan times."[4]

Whether "Old Smoky" is a particular mountain is unsettled: the Folkways annotators place the song probably in the Great Smokies, while the Ballad Index editor finds that region plausible but notes that its highest summit, Clingmans Dome, does not keep its snow through the summer.[4][1] None of the sources consulted here identifies a specific peak with any certainty.[1][4] The song also lived on in oral tradition: Max Hunter recorded Mrs. Claudie Richardson and Glenda Sue Richardson singing it at Mountain View, Arkansas, in 1971.[6] Its tune has also carried many parodies, among them "On Top of Spaghetti."[1]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index (Waltz & Engle): "On Top of Old Smokey".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index (Waltz & Engle): "Wagoner's Lad, The".
  3. Internet Archive: "English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians" (Campbell & Sharp, 1917), No. 64, p. 215.
  4. Smithsonian Folkways: "Pete Seeger, American Favorite Ballads Vol. 1" liner notes (SFW 40150), track 18.
  5. Smithsonian National Museum of American History: "On Top of Old Smoky" (sheet music, 1951).
  6. Missouri State University, Max Hunter Collection: "On Top of Old Smoky".