The Bell Cow: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"The Bell Cow," also known as "Old Bell Cow," is a comic farmyard song about a cow that is hard to milk, and the Traditional Ballad Index lists it as anonymous and from the southeastern United States.[1] The title refers to the bell cow, which the Traditional Tune Archive describes as the leading cow of a herd, belled so that a herd grazing far out in the hills could be found by listening for it.[2] The Ballad Index's earliest firm date is a 1929 recording by the Dixie Crackers, though it notes a possible earlier version in Ethel Park Richardson's American Mountain Songs (1927), a very short text headed "The Bell-Cow."[1] The Traditional Tune Archive lists the Dixie Crackers, from north Georgia, on Paramount 3151 and dates the record to 1928; for the year, sources differ.[3]

Painting of cows coming over a hill at sunset while a herdsman on a rise blows a horn against an orange sky

Jean-François Millet, Calling the Cows Home, oil on wood, ca. 1872. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

The New Lost City Ramblers opened their 1959 Folkways album Old Timey Songs for Children with "Old Bell Cow."[4] The album's notes name the Dixie Crackers as their source, with Mike Seeger on fiddle and lead vocal.[5] The Tune Archive says the Ramblers also included it in a 1964 Oak Publications songbook.[3] Other old-time fiddle tunes carry the same name, and the Tune Archive says the song appears to have little relation to at least two of them.[3]

Don Pedi includes "The Bell Cow" in Mountain Dulcimer Mother Goose, a collection of 29 easy old-time songs and nursery rhymes arranged for solo mountain dulcimer and voice, where it is set in DGD tuning.[6]

Our book that contains the song "The Bell Cow"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Old Bell Cow".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Old Bell Cow (2)".
  3. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Old Bell Cow (3)".
  4. Smithsonian Folkways: "The New Lost City Ramblers, Old Timey Songs for Children".
  5. Smithsonian Folkways: "Old Timey Songs for Children, liner notes (FW07064)".
  6. Don Pedi: "Mountain Dulcimer Mother Goose".
  7. Image: Jean-François Millet, Calling the Cows Home, oil on wood, ca. 1872. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song