Paw Paw Patch: A Song History

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"Paw Paw Patch" is an American play-party song; in the texts summarized by the Traditional Ballad Index, the singers wonder where a girl has gone (she is Susie, Liza or Nellie, depending on the version) and find her picking up pawpaws in the patch.[1] Pete Seeger's notes to a 1959 Folkways album explain that the play party arose in the nineteenth century out of religious opposition to dancing, voiced especially by preachers in the Midwest and South, and that it was done without instruments, the singing itself telling the players which moves to make.[2] The fruit in question is the pawpaw, Asimina triloba, which is native to the eastern and midwestern United States and is the largest fruit native to the country.[3] Because the plant spreads by root suckers, a pawpaw "patch" can be a single tree with many stems joined underground.[4]

Young women in long dresses hold hands in a circle around a blindfolded player on a lawn, with autumn trees behind.

Alexandre Lunois and Auguste Clot, Blind Man’s Bluff, color lithograph, 1897. A different circle game, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

The earliest date the Ballad Index gives for the song is 1916.[1] That year the Indiana Historical Commission published Leah Jackson Wolford's The Play-Party in Indiana, a collection of the games she found in Ripley County, and it includes "Way Down in the Pawpaw Patch."[5] The Ballad Index also lists printings in Vance Randolph's Ozark Folksongs (as "Paw-Paw Peeling") and in Alan Lomax's The Folk Songs of North America, and it notes that the song shares its tune and meter with "Where Is Old Elijah?"[1][6] A teaching handout hosted on the Tennessee Arts Commission's arts-education site gives one version of the game, credited to Gladys Jameson's Sweet Rivers of Song (Berea College, 1967): partners face each other in two lines, the head child circles the set alone and then with a partner, the other couples follow, and the head couple forms an arch at the bottom so that everyone passes under it and a new couple stands at the top.[7]

Pete Seeger, Mika Seeger and Rev. Larry Eisenberg recorded the song for American Play Parties (Folkways FC 7604), released in 1959.[2] Steve Eulberg includes it, in a cross-string version for D-F#-A-D tuning, in Dulci-Bro: Method And Resources For Playing Resonator Dulcimer, an 84-page resonator-dulcimer method published by Fingers Of Steel.[8]

Our book that contains the song "Paw Paw Patch"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index (folklorist.org): "The Paw-Paw Patch".
  2. Smithsonian Folkways: "American Play Parties" (FC 7604), liner notes.
  3. USDA Agricultural Research Service, Agricultural Research magazine: "Pawpaws Making a Comeback".
  4. Clemson Extension Forestry and Wildlife: "What is a Pawpaw Patch?".
  5. Indiana Historical Commission (copy hosted at the University of Notre Dame): "Leah Jackson Wolford, The Play-Party in Indiana (1916)".
  6. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Bibliography".
  7. Tennessee Arts Commission, Arts Education (teaching handout): "Pawpaw Patch Play-Party Games".
  8. Fingers Of Steel: "Steve Eulberg, Dulci-Bro: Method And Resources For Playing Resonator Dulcimer".
  9. Image: Alexandre Lunois and Auguste Clot, Blind Man’s Bluff, color lithograph, 1897. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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