Step Around Johnny: A Song History
“Step Around Johnny” is an American reel from Alabama, played in the key of D with the fiddle in standard tuning.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive traces it to Joe “Sam” Taylor (1929–2017), a fiddler born in Oneonta, Blount County, who learned it from his maternal grandfather, Jim Allen.[1] The same entry notes that Taylor’s aunt knew the tune by another name, the “Jones Piece.”[1]
William Sidney Mount, Great-Grand-Father's Tale of the Revolution: A Portrait of Reverend Zachariah Greene, oil on canvas, 1852. An old man telling a story to his great-grandchildren, shown because the fiddler Sam Taylor learned the tune from his grandfather; the painting has no connection to the tune.
Taylor’s playing survives in a field recording made by Jim and Joyce Cauthen, which the Slippery Hill archive files under old-time fiddling from Alabama.[2] Starting in the early 1980s, the Cauthens sought out Alabama fiddlers who had learned their music from relatives and neighbors, and Centrum credits recordings by their string bands with bringing “Step Around, Johnny” to a wider audience.[3] One of those bands, Red Mountain White Trash, included it on the 1999 album Chickens Don’t Roost Too High.[1][3] The tune has since been printed in collections for players, among them two Tractor Tavern tune books compiled by Silberberg (2002 and 2005) and the third volume of Susan Songer and Clyde Curley’s Portland Collection (2015).[1]
For mountain dulcimer, Mark Gilston sets it among the forty classic American old-time tunes in American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 1, a 51-page book sold as a digital download.[4]
Sources
- Traditional Tune Archive: "Step around Johnny".
- Slippery Hill: "Step Around Johnny".
- Centrum: "Jim and Joyce Cauthen".
- Mark Gilston: "American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 1".
- Image: William Sidney Mount, Great-Grand-Father's Tale of the Revolution: A Portrait of Reverend Zachariah Greene, oil on canvas, 1852. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.