Shoo Fly: A Song History

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“Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me” is known from printings of 1869, as a song of the blackface minstrel stage, and its authorship was disputed from the start. That year the Boston firm White, Smith & Perry issued it, under the period spelling “Shew Fly!”, as a comic song and dance, or “walk round,” with words credited to Billy Reeves, music to Frank Campbell and the arrangement to Rollin Howard; library catalogers classify it under minstrel shows and caricatures.[1] The same publisher also brought out an instrumental galop on the tune that year.[2] Also in 1869, C. H. Ditson & Co. of New York published a rival edition naming Thomas Brigham Bishop as composer and presenting the song as a walk round from a minstrel farce.[3]

1864 photograph of a Union army tent camp on the plain at Chattanooga, with Lookout Mountain rising behind

George N. Barnard, Lookout Mountain from Chattanooga, Tennessee, with the camp of the Engineer Brigade, photograph, 1864. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The song’s Civil War reputation traces largely to Bishop, a songwriter and showman born in Maine in 1835. According to a Civil War Times profile, he paid a substitute rather than serve when drafted, then ran a variety and minstrel show in Chattanooga in 1864; in the story of the song’s birth, told in differing versions, he built the refrain from a remark he overheard from a Black soldier on guard at his show tent.[4] The same profile notes that his claims to other famous songs have been disputed.[4] Some versions of the lyric name a lettered army company, which the Traditional Tune Archive takes as a hint of military roots.[5] Still, the earliest printings found in the sources consulted here date from 1869, four years after the war ended, so the wartime origin rests on these later accounts.

The melody outlived its stage origins. West Virginia fiddler Clark Kessinger recorded it as an instrumental for Brunswick in 1930, and folklorist Vance Randolph counted it among Ozark fiddle tunes in 1954.[5] In 1966 Alan Jabbour recorded Henry Reed playing it at his home in Glen Lyn, Virginia; Jabbour called it “a lively dance tune” whose melody belongs to the later nineteenth century.[6] Over time the song also settled into the children’s repertoire,[5] and Pete Seeger’s version appears on the Smithsonian Folkways collection American Folk, Game and Activity Songs.[7]

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Sources

  1. Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins University: "Shew Fly! Comic Song and Dance, or Walk Round" (1869).
  2. Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins University: "Rollin Howard".
  3. IMSLP Petrucci Music Library: "Shoo Fly (Bishop, Thomas Brigham)".
  4. HistoryNet (Civil War Times, December 2013): "The Minstrel Man: Thomas Brigham Bishop".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Shoo Fly".
  6. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, Henry Reed Fiddle Tunes: "Shoo Fly".
  7. Smithsonian Folkways: Pete Seeger, "Shoo Fly".