Sheep Shell Corn: A Song History

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The Traditional Tune Archive files "Sheep Shell Corn" under its long title, "Sheep Shell Corn by the Rattling of His Horn," and treats it as an American reel in cut time that became a standard among the older fiddlers of Galax and Grayson County in southwestern Virginia.[1] It also turns up under such names as "Sheep Shuckin' Corn" and "Sheepy Shell Corn."[1] The title phrase was in print before any recording, in a 1902 poem by Joel Chandler Harris in The Century and in Thomas W. Talley's 1922 collection of African American folk rhymes, where it goes with a different tune; the archive calls the meaning of the words obscure.[1] A second strand runs through the Ozarks, where Vance Randolph put "Sheepie Shell Corn" on a 1954 list of fiddle tunes and where George Mert Reeves played a version the archive describes as quite unlike the Galax one.[1]

Etching of a group of woolly sheep and a ram resting together on a grassy slope.

Stefano della Bella, Sheep and Ram in a Pasture, plate 12 from Various Animals, etching, ca. 1641. Sheep and a ram, shown for the title; the etching has no connection to the tune.

The earliest recording named in the sources consulted here is by the Galax fiddler Emmett Lundy (1864–1953), whom Alan Lomax recorded at Galax in August 1941 for the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song, with Kelly Lundy on guitar.[1][2] Those two sources disagree about the rest of that session, naming different banjo players and different companions for Lomax.[1][2] Lundy's performance was issued in 1977 on the String LP Fiddle Tunes From Grayson County, Virginia (STR 802).[2] Later recordings came from Luther Davis and Roscoe Parish, the Highwoods String Band and Dan Gellert, while the fiddler Brad Leftwich knows the melody as "Fuller's Reel" after the source who taught it to him.[1]

"Sheep Shell Corn" appears in Phyllis Gaskins's Galax Dulcimer: A Job Of Journey Work, a Fingers Of Steel book, among the tunes whose scale starts at the fourth fret of a dulcimer with every string tuned to D, played with a partial capo across the drone strings at the first fret.[3]

Our book that contains the song "Sheep Shell Corn"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Sheep Shell Corn by the Rattling of His Horn".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: "Emmett W. Lundy: Fiddle Tunes From Grayson County, Virginia".
  3. Fingers Of Steel: "Phyllis Gaskins, Galax Dulcimer: A Job Of Journey Work".
  4. Image: Stefano della Bella, Sheep and Ram in a Pasture, plate 12 from Various Animals, etching, ca. 1641. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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