Wake Up Susan: A Song History
"Wake Up Susan" is an American reel, usually played in A major, with roots that reach back at least to the middle of the 19th century. A version appears in the manuscript tunebook of Isaac Homan, a shipbuilder and fiddler from Bellport on Long Island, and the tune is printed under its familiar name in Ryan's Mammoth Collection of 1883.[1] Kerr's Merry Melodies gave it as "The Breakdown."[1] Its origins are uncertain. Samuel Bayard suspected the blackface minstrel stage, working with strains borrowed from the British Isles, though he found no Old World source for the tune itself, while Alan Jabbour linked its family of related American tunes to the Irish and Scottish reel "Mason's Apron."[1]
Félix Bracquemond, rooster and morning glories, etching for the Rousseau dinner service, 1866. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The tune traveled widely and picked up other names along the way, among them "Hop Up Susan," "Up Jumped Susie" and "Hell on the Wabash." It has been played in Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri, Texas and northern New York.[1] The collector Christeson noted in 1973 that the older American collections mostly give it as a two-part tune.[1] In 1971 the Library of Congress issued American Fiddle Tunes, an LP of field recordings from 1934 to 1942 compiled by Jabbour, and it includes a performance by fiddler Elmer Barton.[2] Slim Miller fiddled it on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, broadcast from Kentucky over Cincinnati's WLW on April 12, 1941.[3] Commercial recordings include Ed Haley's Parkersburg Landing (Rounder, 1976) and Lyman Enloe's Fiddle Tunes I Recall (County).[1] The Missouri fiddler Vee Latty played a version whose first two strains stay close to the older tune.[4]
The title is not unique. The Traditional Tune Archive lists a second "Wake Up Susan," a three-part A-major reel from Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1995) that has no connection to the better-known tune.[5] "Wake Up Susan" is one of the tunes in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[6]
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