There's A Brown Skin Girl Down The Road Somewhere: A Song History

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“There’s A Brown Skin Girl Down The Road Somewhere” is a Texas country rag in the key of G, played in standard fiddle tuning with three strains in an AABC form.[1] Who wrote it is unsettled: the Victor record credited Eck Robertson as composer, while the Traditional Tune Archive cites Charles Wolfe (1997) as reporting that the tune is usually attributed to Lewis “Lefty” Franklin, born in Bonham, Texas, a left-handed fiddler who was Robertson’s great rival at fiddle contests.[1][2] Robertson, born in Delany, Arkansas, in 1887 and raised on a farm near Amarillo, is best known for the Victor sessions he made in New York in 1922, which historians widely regard as the first commercial country recordings.[3]

Brown wash drawing of a dirt road curving past tall pines and brush

Thomas Doughty, Landscape with Winding Road, brush and brown wash over graphite, 1833. A winding American country road, shown as a nod to the tune's title; the drawing has no connection to the tune.

Robertson recorded the tune in Dallas on August 12, 1929, on fiddle with his family backing him: his wife Nettie on guitar, his son Dueron on tenor banjo and his daughter Daphne on tenor guitar.[2] Victor released it on V-40145, with “Texas Wagoner” on the other side.[4] The Tune Archive notes that the piece calls for quick playing up the neck, and lists printed versions in Stacy Phillips’s Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1995) and David Brody’s Fiddler’s Fakebook (1983), along with later recordings by Howdy Forrester, Herman Johnson and the Luke Smathers String Band.[1] The trio Ship in the Clouds put it on their 1978 Folkways album Old Time Instrumental Music as “There’s a Brown Skin Gal Down the Road Somewheres.”[5]

On the mountain dulcimer, it is one of the forty tunes in Mark Gilston’s American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 1, whose download pairs the complete book with a PDF of every tune on its own.[6]

Our book that contains the song "There's A Brown Skin Girl Down The Road Somewhere"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "There's a Brown Skin Girl down the Road Somewhere".
  2. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-55347. There's a brown skin girl down the road somewhere / Eck Robertson".
  3. Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State University: "A.C. (Eck) Robertson".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor V-40145".
  5. Smithsonian Folkways: "Ship in the Clouds: Old Time Instrumental Music".
  6. Mark Gilston: "American Old Time Tunes For Dulcimer, Volume 1".
  7. Image: Thomas Doughty, Landscape with Winding Road, brush and brown wash over graphite, 1833. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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