Sally’s Got Mud Between Her Toes: A Song History
"Sally's Got Mud Between Her Toes" is an American reel in D major, also titled "Sal's Got Mud Between Her Toes," that traces to Pat Kingery (1912–c. 1976), a fiddler from Nobob in Barren County, southern Kentucky.[1] Bruce Greene recorded Kingery playing it in the field in 1976.[1] Greene's Kentucky fieldwork is preserved at Berea College, whose Bruce Greene Kentucky Fiddle Music Collection gathers 174 tapes of interviews and tunes from the 1970s through the 1990s, documenting several dozen fiddlers, chiefly from the south and southeast of the state.[2]
Winslow Homer, Low Tide (from "Every Saturday," Vol. I, New Series), wood engraving, August 6, 1870. Barefoot girls on a beach, shown for the title; it has no connection to the tune.
Kingery played the tune without singing, but he later told Greene that words had once gone with it; Bob Coltman, a musician, instrument-maker and songwriter, took those words as an opening verse and wrote a chorus and further verses.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive cautions that written versions of the tune vary considerably from one another.[1] Recordings followed in the mid-1990s, by Bruce Greene and Hilary Dirlam on the Rounder album Fiddler's Dozen (1994) and by the Tarheel Hotshots on Young Fogies, Vol. II (1995), and Silberberg printed it in Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern (2002).[1] For dulcimer players, Don Pedi sets it in DAA tuning in Bound To Have A Little Fun!, a book of 29 transcriptions, each with an MP3, a few of them given in more than one tuning.[3]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Sally's got Mud between Her Toes".
- Berea College Special Collections and Archives: "Bruce Greene Kentucky Fiddle Music Collection".
- Don Pedi: "Bound To Have A Little Fun!".
- Image: Winslow Homer, Low Tide (from "Every Saturday," Vol. I, New Series), wood engraving, August 6, 1870. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.