The Old Grey Mare: A Song History

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"The Old Grey Mare" belongs to a sprawling family of American songs in which an animal comes out of the wilderness; the Traditional Ballad Index files versions about a grey mare, an old grey horse and a little black bull together, and notes that the song has also served as a play-party game.[1] Its melody first reached print in 1858 as "Down in Alabam'," credited to J. Warner of the minstrel troupe Bryant's Minstrels.[2] An arrangement of it by Walter Meadows came out in New York that year from William Hall & Son.[3] Both the Ballad Index and the Traditional Tune Archive suspect the tune is older: the Ballad Index thinks it probably circulated among Black singers before the 1850s and points to an 1838 Virginia account of a plantation dance, while the Tune Archive notes a close kinship with a revival hymn printed in Slave Songs of the United States (1867).[1][2] A popular legend ties the song to a horse that bolted at the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862, but the Ballad Index observes that the 1858 sheet music rules this out.[1]

Painting of a pale grey-white horse standing in profile against a dark background

Winslow Homer, White Mare, oil on panel, c. 1868. A white mare painted in the late 1860s, a decade after the song first reached print in 1858; the painting has no connection to the song.

The tune soon took on new words, and the Tune Archive cites Mark Wilson for a parody that featured in Abraham Lincoln's 1860 campaign.[2] It also lived on as a dance tune, remembered as a Southwestern hoedown around 1900 by Arizona fiddler Kenner C. Kartchner and listed among Ozark fiddle tunes by Vance Randolph in 1954.[2] Early country records followed: Land Norris sang "The Old Grey Mare" to his own banjo for OKeh in New York in April 1926,[4] and Georgia fiddler Earl Johnson and His Clodhoppers cut "Old Grey Mare Kicking Out of the Wilderness" for OKeh in Atlanta in October 1927.[2][5] Obed "Dad" Pickard, whose family band played on the early Grand Ole Opry, recorded the tune on jew's harp for Columbia that same year.[2] Bayard, in Dance to the Fiddle (1981), offered it as an example of a popular tune passing into tradition, though he left open the possibility that Warner had simply reworked an existing folk melody that later went back into oral tradition.[2]

Don Pedi tunes his dulcimer to DGD for "The Old Grey Mare" in Mountain Dulcimer Mother Goose, a self-published book of children's songs whose download bundles a separate sheet-music file and an MP3 for every title.[6]

Our book that contains the song "The Old Grey Mare"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Old Gray Mare (I)".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Old Grey Mare Came Tearing Out of the Wilderness (The)".
  3. IMSLP: "Down in Alabam (Warner, J.)".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "OKeh matrix 80009. The old grey mare / Land Norris".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "OKeh matrix W81709. Old grey mare kicking out of the wilderness / Earl Johnson and his Clodhoppers".
  6. Don Pedi: "Mountain Dulcimer Mother Goose - Old-Time Songs & Nursery Rhymes For All Ages".
  7. Image: Winslow Homer, White Mare, oil on panel, c. 1868. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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