Weevily Wheat: A Song History

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“Weevily Wheat” is a traditional American play-party song, a sung game whose figures resembled those of the Virginia Reel.[1] Such gatherings let children and young adults sing and play games much like dancing, minus the touching and certain steps that led some people to disapprove of dances.[2] The “Charlie” who turns up in many versions has long invited guesses: Andrew Lang, as cited by Iona and Peter Opie, took him for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Alan Lomax traced the song to Scottish “Charlie” material, though the Traditional Ballad Index judges the question hard to prove either way.[3] Sources differ on the Scottish link itself: the Traditional Tune Archive calls the air derived from “Royal Charlie” and “Wha’ll be King but Charlie,” while the Ballad Index treats Lady Nairne’s Jacobite song as a separate piece that only sometimes blends with it.[1][3]

Young men and women sit among heaps of corn in a lantern-lit barn, husking ears and talking at a harvest gathering.

Winslow Homer, Husking the Corn in New England, wood engraving, from Harper's Weekly, November 13, 1858. A New England corn-husking party engraved after Winslow Homer in 1858, shown for the country gatherings where play-party songs were sung; the engraving has no connection to the song.

Will Allen Dromgoole mentions it in Sunny Side of the Cumberland (1886), and Scott and Angel’s history of the Thirteenth Regiment, Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, tells of Union prisoners and their Confederate guards playing it together at a Christmas Eve party in 1861, during which some of the prisoners escaped.[1] Collectors later found it from the Ozarks, Kentucky and North Carolina to Texas, Indiana, New England and Maritime Canada, and Cecil Sharp printed an Appalachian version as “Charlie’s Sweet.”[3] Alan Lomax recorded Aunt Molly Jackson singing it in New York City in September 1935.[4] In 1939 Louis Watson Chappell recorded Wise Bailes, a retired logger, singing it unaccompanied at Leivasy in Nicholas County, West Virginia.[5] Kelly Harrell’s 1927 Victor record “Charley, He’s a Good Old Man” belongs to the same song family.[3] Mike Yates, who recorded Eunice Yeatts MacAlexander singing it at Meadows of Dan in Patrick County, Virginia, in 1979, describes the piece as usually a play-party song.[6]

The song also found its way into prairie fiction: in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Banks of Plum Creek, Pa sings and fiddles it on Christmas Eve, and Willa Cather has children sing it in a kitchen scene in My Ántonia.[2] For mountain dulcimer players, it appears in The Doofus – Occasional Number 1, a collection of eighteen traditional songs and tunes from the repertoire of the ensemble The Doofus, written out by Neal Walters and Heidi Cerrigione.[7]

Our book that contains the song "Weevily Wheat"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Weavily Wheat".
  2. Cather Studies, Volume 14: "Back to Virginia: 'Weevily Wheat,' My Ántonia, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl".
  3. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Weevily Wheat".
  4. Alan Lomax in Eastern Kentucky (University of Kentucky / Berea College / American Folklife Center): "Weevily Wheat" (Aunt Molly Jackson, 1935).
  5. West Virginia University Libraries, West Virginia Folk Music: "Weevily Wheat" (Wise Bailes, 1939).
  6. Mainly Norfolk: "Weevily Wheat / Charlie".
  7. Neal Walters: "The Doofus - Occasional Number 1 - 18 Traditional Songs And Tunes For Mountain Dulcimer".
  8. Image: Winslow Homer, Husking the Corn in New England, wood engraving, from Harper's Weekly, November 13, 1858. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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