Silly Bill: A Song History
The name “Silly Bill” was around long before anyone recorded the fiddle tune. The Traditional Tune Archive traces a comic stage song by that name to 1856, when it appeared under the title “Altogether Green” (alternatively “I Rather Think I Will”). Singers set it to more than one melody, and it remained well liked into the early 1900s, with versions collected as far apart as Mississippi and Michigan. In the mid-1800s, the archive adds, a “silly Bill” was a fairground or street clown who served as the butt of another comic’s jokes.[1] The sources consulted do not establish how, or whether, that stage song is connected to the instrumental tune.
William Sidney Mount, Cider Making, oil on canvas, 1840–41. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A rural scene of the period; the painting is not connected to the tune.
The fiddle tune was a local favorite in and around Galax, Virginia. Uncle Charlie Higgins (1878–1967) of Grayson County, in southwestern Virginia, played it in F, while Al Hopkins’s band cut a version in G for Okeh in New York on January 15, 1925.[1] The archive passes along an account attributed to Mark Green: asked by Ralph Peer, who ran the Okeh session, what the group was called, Hopkins is said to have answered that they were just hillbillies from North Carolina and Virginia, and the disc was issued under the name “The Hill Billies.” The archive describes this as the first time the term was attached to old-time music, a claim the sources consulted do not independently confirm.[1] Today the tune appears in Stephen Seifert’s Join the Jam collection for mountain dulcimer.[2]
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