Walking That Pretty Girl Home: A Song History

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“Walking That Pretty Girl Home” is an old-time reel in G major that comes from the playing of Luther Davis (1887–1986), a fiddler in Grayson County, Virginia.[1] The Traditional Tune Archive associates Davis with the county’s Meadow Creek section and also lists the tune as “I Walked that Pretty Girl Home.”[1][2] Davis learned from older fiddlers of the area, among them Emmett Lundy and the Rector brothers, and folklorists Tom Carter and Blanton Owen recorded his playing in 1973 and 1974, when he was living a short way west of Galax.[3]

Photograph of a tree-lined country road at dusk with figures walking in the distance

Léonard Missone, Women on a Country Road, oil print, c. 1928. A country road at dusk, shown for the tune's title.

The archive’s annotator suggests the piece was probably a song tune at one time, though the sources consulted here give no words for it.[1] According to the archive, it has been recorded on Mike Seeger and Paul Brown’s Way Down in North Carolina (1996) and on The Road to Agate Hill (2006), the latter credited as coming from Davis; no track list was found among the sources consulted here to confirm either.[1] Novelist Lee Smith’s website promotes The Road to Agate Hill as a CD by Alice Gerrard, Gail Gillespie and Sharon Sandomirsky, explaining that it grew out of readings at which Gerrard and friends played tunes connected with Smith’s novel On Agate Hill.[4]

Phyllis Gaskins includes it among the G tunes in Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer), a book on the Galax dulcimer that also gives instructions for DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Walking That Pretty Girl Home"

Browse more tunes like this: Old-Time & Fiddle Tunes Dulcimer Tab

Sources

  1. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Walking that Pretty Girl Home" (annotation).
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Walking that Pretty Girl Home".
  3. The Field Recorders' Collective: "Luther Davis – FRC745".
  4. Lee Smith: "On Agate Hill".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Phyllis Gaskins, Pig In A Pen (And Other Fiddle Ditties For Galax Dulcimer)".
  6. Image: Léonard Missone, Women on a Country Road, oil print, c. 1928. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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