Puncheon Floor: A Song History

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In the speech of the southern mountains, a puncheon is a split log or rough timber, dressed flat on one face with an adze and used for floors, benches and the walls of log buildings.[1] Writers quoted in the Southern Appalachian English dictionary describe cabin floors built from halved logs or broad poplar timbers, their curved undersides left rough and their upper faces worked flat.[1] Ira Ford, who printed a "Puncheon Floor" in Traditional Music in America (1940), traced that tune's name to such floors and ranked it among America's best-loved old dance tunes.[2]

Etching of villagers dancing inside a crowded rustic inn

Adriaen van Ostade, The Dance at the Inn, etching, 1652. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A Dutch dance on an inn floor rather than a puncheon floor, shown for its subject.

The Traditional Tune Archive says several tunes are called "Puncheon Floor," some related and some quite distinct.[2] It notes the title in a 1931 newspaper account of a fiddlers' contest in LaFollette, Tennessee, and in Vance Randolph's 1954 list of Ozarks fiddle tunes, and it says the melody behind Randolph's listing is unknown.[2] The Archive files two field-recorded versions under separate entries: Mississippi fiddler Hardy Sharp's, recorded for the Library of Congress in 1939, and Arkansas fiddler Skeeter Walden's, collected in 1951.[3][4] The Louis Watson Chappell Collection at the West Virginia & Regional History Center holds a "Puncheon Floor" played on fiddle by Dewey Hamrick at Valley Head, West Virginia, on 4 September 1947.[5]

In North Carolina, a reel called "Puncheon on the Floor," also known as "Puncheon Floor," comes from Esker Hutchins of Dobson, who learned it from the local fiddler Crawley Hamlin.[6] Hutchins mentored the Round Peak fiddler Benton Flippen, and the Field Recorders' Collective CD of Hutchins's own playing includes "Puncheon Floor" among the tunes it says he learned from Hamlin.[7] Dulcimer player Don Pedi included a "Dandy Lusk / Puncheon Floor" medley on The Hog Went Through the Fence, Yoke and All, an album with fiddler Bruce Greene.[8] His catalog lists "Puncheon Floor" in Simply Old-Time Dulcimer and "Bullfrog on a Puncheon Floor" in a separate book, Bound to Have a Little Fun.[8] The sources consulted here do not say which "Puncheon Floor" melody his arrangement follows.[8]

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Sources

  1. University of South Carolina, Southern Appalachian English: "puncheon".
  2. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Puncheon Floor (1)".
  3. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Puncheon Floor (2)".
  4. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Puncheon Floor (3)".
  5. West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia Folk Music: "Puncheon Floor" (Dewey Hamrick, 1947).
  6. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Puncheon on the Floor".
  7. Field Recorders' Collective: "Esker Hutchins – FRC107".
  8. Don Pedi: "Don Pedi Recordings" (catalog).