Prettiest Little Girl In The County: A Song History
"Prettiest Little Girl in the County," sometimes ending in "County-O," is a sung reel in G that the Traditional Tune Archive describes as fairly common across the South.[1] The Archive connects it with an 1840s song from the minstrel songbooks, observes that it has a play-party life too, and warns that the minstrel-era verses are troubling in light of slavery's history.[1]
Winslow Homer, Family Party Playing at Fox and Geese, wood engraving, 1857. Young people at a party chasing game in the 1850s, shown for the tune's play-party life; it has no connection to the tune.
On September 10, 1924, in New York, Gid Tanner sang and fiddled it for Columbia with Riley Puckett on guitar, although the Discography of American Historical Recordings lists no issue from that session.[2] Tanner, Puckett and Clayton McMichen cut it again with the Skillet Lickers on April 10, 1928, and Columbia released that version on 15315-D.[3] According to the Archive, the band later renamed the tune "Prosperity Breakdown" in praise of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and it is heard just a single time in one of their 1934 skit-medleys.[1] Field collectors met it too: the Archive lists Library of Congress recordings by J. D. Dillingham and J. H. Hudson in 1935 and by W. A. Bledsoe in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1939, and the Lomax Kentucky collection holds a fiddle tune called "Prettiest Little Girl In the Country-O," played by George C. Nicholson in October 1937.[1][4]
Printed versions include Rosenbaum's Folk Visions and Voices (1989), from Gordon Tanner of Dacula, Georgia, and Titon's Old Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (2001), from Jake Phelps and Street Butler of Todd County, and the Archive's list of recordings includes albums by Clyde Davenport, W. L. Gregory, Gene Goforth and Kenny Hall.[1] Phyllis Gaskins lists "Prettiest Little Girl In The County" among the G tunes of Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer), a Fingers Of Steel book on Galax dulcimer playing that follows her earlier A Job Of Journey Work.[5]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Prettiest Girl in the County".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix 140002. Prettiest little girl in the county / Gid Tanner".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia 15315-D (10-in. double-faced)".
- Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings: "Prettiest Little Girl In the Country-O".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Phyllis Gaskins, Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer)".
- Image: Winslow Homer, Family Party Playing at Fox and Geese, wood engraving, 1857. The Cleveland Museum of Art.