Skip To My Lou: A Song History

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"Skip to My Lou" is an American play-party song, and it makes most sense in that setting. In his notes to the 1959 Folkways album American Play Parties, Pete Seeger traces the play party to nineteenth-century religious opposition to dancing. Preachers in many places, above all in the Midwest and South, damned the fiddle, and a girl caught at a dance risked expulsion from her church; as the saying went, she had "danced herself right out of the church." The young answered with singing games that used no instruments at all: everyone sang, and the verses called the figures.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index classes the song as a courting play-party piece, reported from the Appalachians, the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, the Southeast and the South, and gives it Roud number 3593.[2] Not every family drew the line in the same place. When Alan Lomax recorded Aunt Molly Jackson in New York in May 1939, she talked about songs her parents forbade because they thought play parties themselves sinful, and sang scraps of play songs including "Skip to My Lou."[3]

Eastman Johnson painting of neighbors gathered among corn shocks for a husking in an autumn field

Eastman Johnson, Corn Husking at Nantucket, oil on canvas, ca. 1875. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A rural American gathering, shown for atmosphere; it has no connection to the song.

How old the song is remains uncertain. The earliest date the Ballad Index gives is 1911, when Mrs. L. D. Ames printed a text and tune in her article "The Missouri Play-Party" in the Journal of American Folklore.[2] An older claim comes from Carl Sandburg, whose Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926) lists "Skip-to-My-Lou" as a party game of Indiana's young people and as a favorite in the neighborhood of the Lincoln farm.[4] The Lincolns lived in Indiana from 1816 until 1830,[5] but Sandburg gives no source for the passage, so the Lincoln connection is best treated as anecdote rather than proof of an early date.

Old-time musicians recorded the song in the late 1920s. Uncle Eck Dunford sang "Skip to Ma Lou, My Darling" for Victor at Bristol, Tennessee, on 27 July 1927, in a session supervised by Ralph Peer, with Hattie Stoneman on fiddle; it was issued on Victor 20938.[6] In Atlanta on 10 April 1929 the Georgia Organ Grinders, a string band with three fiddlers (Lowe Stokes, the leader, Clayton McMichen and Bert Layne), Fate Norris on banjo and Melvin Dupree on guitar, recorded it for Columbia 15415-D.[7] Other recordings listed by the Ballad Index include the Ritchie Family and several by Pete Seeger,[2] and Seeger sang it with Mika Seeger and Larry Eisenberg on American Play Parties.[1]

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Sources

  1. Smithsonian Folkways: "American Play Parties" (Folkways FC 7604, 1959), liner notes.
  2. Traditional Ballad Index: "Skip to My Lou".
  3. Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings (University of Kentucky Libraries / Berea College): "Commentary on play-parties and forbidden songs" (Aunt Molly Jackson, 1939).
  4. Internet Archive: Carl Sandburg, "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years," Vol. 1 (1926).
  5. National Park Service, Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial: "History & Culture".
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UCSB): "Victor matrix BVE-39718. Skip to ma lou, my darling / Uncle Eck Dunford".
  7. Discography of American Historical Recordings (UCSB): "Columbia matrix W148231. Skip to my Lou my darling / Georgia Organ Grinders".