Shortnin' Bread: A Song History
Where "Shortnin' Bread" came from is not settled by the sources consulted. The Traditional Ballad Index lists its author as unknown and observes that it is often sung in dialect, with loose verses that turn up in other songs as well.[1] In 1900 the poet James Whitcomb Riley included a dialect poem, "A Short'nin' Bread Song—Pieced Out," in his book Home-Folks.[2] A version gathered from tradition, headed "Shortened Bread," followed in 1915 in E. C. Perrow's "Songs and Rhymes from the South" in the Journal of American Folklore; Perrow's note places it in East Tennessee and dates it to 1912, written down from memory.[3] According to the Ballad Index, words and melody first appeared in print together in Dorothy Scarborough's 1925 collection of African American folk songs, although the song is probably older.[1]
Georg Flegel, Still Life, oil on wood, probably about 1625–30. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Bread in a seventeenth-century still life; the painting is not connected to the song.
Recordings followed in the 1920s. Among those the Ballad Index lists are Henry Whitter's (OKeh, 1924) and Gid Tanner & His Skillet Lickers' (Columbia, 1927), along with field recordings made in 1940 and 1942.[1] For mountain dulcimer players, it is one of the 75 tunes in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, which gathers popular pieces from the dulcimer jamming tradition.[4]
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