(Old Time Music Song) "Sugar In My Coffee-O" (sound files, information, & lyrics)

BBYMRLCCOTN, Jan 15, 2010
-snip-
Here's information about Fiddlin'" John Carson from 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddlin%27_John_Carson 
"Fiddlin'" John Carson (March 23, 1868 – December 11, 1949) was an American old-time fiddler and singer who recorded what is widely considered to be the first country music song featuring vocals and lyrics

**** Edited by Azizi Powell This pancocojams post showcases two YouTube sound files of the old time music songs that are related to the song that is known as "Sugar In My Coffee-O". Some information and comments about and lyrics for songs entitled "Sugar In My Coffee-O" and some related songs are also included in this pancocojams post. The content of this post is presented for folkloric, cultural, and entertainment purposes. All copyrights remain with their owners. Thanks to the unknown composers and the performers of these songs. Thanks also to all those musicians who are featured on this showcased sound file and thanks to the publisher of this sound file on YouTube. -snip- Click for these related pancocojams posts: http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/02/1844-old-time-music-minstrel-song-dandy.html "1844 Old Time Music, Minstrel Song) - "Dandy Jim From Caroline" (video, information, comments, & lyrics)" and http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/09/whatll-i-do-with-baby-o-fudge-fudge.html "The Folk Song "What'll I Do With The Baby-O" Is A Source For The Children's Rhyme "Fudge Fudge Call The Judge" (also found as "Mama's Having A Baby")"
**** SHOWCASE SOUND FILE #2: Uncle Dave Macon - Wouldn't Give Me Sugar In My Coffee

Tom Page, Apr 6, 2020 Uncle Dave Macon - Wouldn't Give Me Sugar In My Coffee, 1927 -snip- Here's some information about (White American) Uncle Dave Macon: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Dave_Macon "David Harrison Macon (October 7, 1870 – March 22, 1952), known professionally as Uncle Dave Macon, was an American old-time banjo player, singer, songwriter, and comedian. Known as "The Dixie Dewdrop", Macon was known for his chin whiskers, plug hat, gold teeth, and gates-ajar collar, he gained regional fame as a vaudeville performer in the early 1920s before becoming the first star of the Grand Ole Opry in the latter half of the decade.

Macon's music is considered the ultimate bridge between 19th-century American folk and vaudeville music and the phonograph and radio-based music of the early 20th-century."... **** INFORMATION ABOUT THE OLD TIME MUSIC SONGS "SUGAR IN MY COFFEE-O" From http://bluegrassmessengers.com/sugar-in-the-coffee-o--version-7-carson.aspx Sugar in My Coffee-O

..."Old-Time Song and Breakdown, Widely known.

[...]

CATEGORY: Fiddle and Instrumental Tunes

DATE: 1843 as “Dandy Jim from Caroline.” First recording as Sugar in My Coffee-O by Crockett's Kentucky Mountaineers, "Sugar in my Coffee" (Crown 3075, c. 1930); First recording as What are You Going To Do With the Baby 1928 by the Hodge Brothers; then Grayson & Whittier in 1929; First recording as Prettiest Little Gal in the County by Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett in 1924. [...]

RELATED TO: Cornstalk Fiddle and a Shoestring Bow; Prettiest Little Girl/Gal in the County-O/Country/World; What'cha Goin' to Do with the Baby; Baby-O; Hell Up Hickory Holler; Who’s Been Here Since I’ve Been Gone?

[...] NOTES: Typical lyrics found in the chorus are “How in the world do the old folks know/That I like sugar in my coffee-o.” Sugar in my Coffee-O is one of a large group of songs that originated from the chorus of Dandy Jim from Caroline:"...

There are three distinct branches of songs that have evolved from Dandy Jim from Caroline. Because they are from the same family the titles and lyrics are interrelated. There are different versions from both black and white sources:

1) The Prettiest Little Girl in the County-O: Includes the titles “Prettiest Little Gal in the Country-O” and “Prettiest Gal in the County-O.” Recorded by Skillet Lickers in 1924.

2) Sugar in my Coffee-O: Includes the titles Sugar in my Coffee/Sugar in my Coffee-O Wouldn't Give Me Sugar in My Coffee/I Like Sugar in my Coffee-O;

3) What’ll We Do With The Baby-O: Titles include “Baby-O.” There are more recordings in this branch.

From Kuntz: Bayard (1981) thinks there is a relationship between Sugar in my Coffee-O and his Pennsylvania-collected sets of "Up Jumped Jinny With Her Shirt Tail Torn" and this tune. The title appears in a list of traditional Ozark Mountain fiddle tunes compiled by musicologist/folklorist Vance Randolph, published in 1954.

African-American collector Thomas Talley, in his book Negro Folk Rhymes (reprinted 1991, edited by Charles Wolfe), prints a song called "Sugar in Coffee" that is related to this song, and predates white recorded versions such as Tennessee's Uncle Dave Macon's ("She Wouldn't Give Me Sugar in My Coffee") and Georgia's Fiddlin' John Carson's ("Little More Sugar in My Coffee").

The “Prettiest Girl in the County-O” tune is similar in its melodic contour to "What're We Gonna Do with the Baby-O" and to “Turkey Buzzard.” R.P. Christeson notes similarity to his “Sugar in the Coffee” (Old Time Fiddler’s Repertory, vol. II, No. 129). "A popular 19th century fiddle and play party tune well remembered by older informants across the South" (Charles Wolfe). Jeff Titon says the tune is generally well known in the South, but not frequently found in the repertoires of Kentucky fiddlers. Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded the tune for the Library of Congress from the playing of fiddler George C. Nicholson. See also Thomas Tally’s No. 41. [Kuntz]

Meade shows a relationship with Cornstalk Fiddle and a Shoestring Bow/Who’s Been Here Since I’ve Been Gone?/Pretty Little Girl with the Blue Dress On songs to the "Sugar in Coffee" family of songs. Meade also references “Prettiest Little Girl in the County-O” songs to "Dandy Jim from Caroline."

Since the Skillet Lickers recorded “Prettiest Little Gal in the County-O” in 1924, with the “I like sugar in the coffee-o” lyrics, it seem likely that most of the “Sugar in the Coffee” titles and songs came from that recording. Many of the early country groups would play the same song under a different title to avoid copyright problems. They would also change some of the lyrics."...

****
SOME LYRICS FOR THIS SONG
Numbers are added for referencing purposes only. These numbers don't coincide with their order in the cited discussion threads.

ONLINE EXCERPT #1
From  http://bluegrassmessengers.com/sugar-in-the-coffee-o--version-7-carson.aspx SUGAR IN MY COFFEE- Fiddlin' John Carson
"Fiddlin' John Carson's 'Little More Sugar In The Coffee' [Okeh 45542]

One stanza only. It is repeated with the third line left out and the

last line is repeated in isolation.

Prettiest girl in the country-o
Daddy and mammy both said so
All dolled up in calico
Little more sugar in the coffee

Prettiest girl in the country-o
Daddy and mammy both said so
Little more sugar in the coffee

Little more sugar in the coffee

****
ONLINE EXCERPT #2 
From https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=40593 Subject: Sugar In My Coffee 
1. From: Stewie, Date: 29 Oct 01 - 08:31 PM
"The Fiddler's Companion entry for this gives the following verses:

SUGAR IN MY COFFEE

Go there once and go no more
If they don't give no sugar in my coffee-o
How in the world's the old folk know
That I'll take sugar in my coffee-o

Sugar's high and sugar's low
But I'll take sugar in my coffee-o
How in the hell's the old folk know
That I'll take sugar in my coffee-o

It refers to versions by Uncle Dave and Fiddlin' John and gives a precursor from Talley's 'Negro Folk Rhymes':

Sheep's in de meader a-mowin' o' de hay
De Honey's in de bee-gum, so dey all say
My head's up an' I'se boun' to go
Who'll take sugar in de coffee-o? (Similar to Uncle Dave Macon's lyric)*

I'se de prettiest liddle gal in de county-o
My mammy an' daddy, dey bofe say so
I looks in de glass, it don't say, "No"
So I'll take sugar in de coffee-o. (Close to John Carson's lyric)*
-snip-
*Pancocojams Editor's Note: Those words in parenthesis aren't part of the song lyrics that are found in the 1922 book Negro Folk Rhymes. That book was edited by Black American university professor and folklorist Thomas W. Talley  (October 9, 1870 – July 14, 1952) who collected examples from his memories and from his Black American students. Click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Talley for information about Thomas W. Talley. 

**
Here's an explanation about the term "bee-gum" from https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=2156 "Sugar in de Coffee-o"
[That website quotes the song lyrics from Talley's Negro Folk Rhymes]

"Notes: *A bee-gum is a bee-hive. Originally it was specifically a hive found in a hollow log or tree."  

**
2.  Stewie, Date: 21 Jan 03 - 01:52 AM
..."Fiddlin' Ryan,

This is what I hear Uncle Dave singing. The transcription, as always, is open for correction. How does it line up with what you hear?

WOULDN'T GIVE ME SUGAR IN MY COFFEE

Instrumental [banjo] introduction.

[Spoken] Hot dog! People, you know, a gentleman asked me last night what I was doing. I said, 'Well, sir, on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I don't do anything'. He says, 'Well, what do you do on Thursday, Friday and Saturday?' I says, 'Why, I rest'. He says, 'You do anything on Sunday?' 'Oh, yes sir, that's my busiest day'. He says, 'What are you doing on Sunday?' I says, 'Getting ready to do nothing on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday'. Ha! Ha!

I'll be dogged if I can see,
How my little honey got away from me,
Been there once, I'm going home,
Wouldn't give me sugar in my coffee-o

Just one thing that bothers my mind,
A world full of women and none of 'em mine
Been there once, I'm going home,
Wouldn't give me sugar in my coffee-o

Well try to look for a needle in the sand,
Try to find a woman that's got no man
Been there once, I'm going home,
Wouldn't give me sugar in my coffee-o

Jaybird sitting on a hickory limb,
Picked up brickbat took him on the chin - hi-ho mister don't you do that again,
Brother, you'll kick the bark off a seasoned hickory limb
Been there once, I'm going home,
Wouldn't give me sugar in my coffee-o

Preacher went to Florida, the truth to tell, he went to Miami at a big hotel,
He went to the beach and the bathing was fine,
Sued for divorce in an hour's time
Been there once, I'm going home,
Wouldn't give me sugar in my coffee-o

Never you mind what your mammy say,
Shake your little foot and sail away,
Been there once, I'm going home,
Wouldn't give me sugar in my coffee-o

Source: transcription of Uncle Dave Macon 'Wouldn't Give Me Sugar In My Coffee' recorded on 8 September 1926 and issued as Vocalion 15440 in December 1926 [also as Vocalion 5002 in February 1927]. Reissued on Uncle Dave Macon 'Wait 'Till The Clouds Roll By 1926-1939' Historical LP HLP-8006 [1975].

Fiddlin' John Carson's 'Little More Sugar In The Coffee' [Okeh 45542] is one stanza only. It is repeated with the third line left out and the last line is repeated in isolation.

Prettiest girl in the country-o
Daddy and mammy both said so
All dolled up in calico
Little more sugar in the coffee"

**
3. GUEST,Bob Coltman, Date: 19 May 09 - 03:06 PM
"Hi Stewie, (only 6 years later ... how's that for quick response?)

Some suggested changes:

Chorus: Been there once, I wouldn't go no mo'

That badly mixed up 4th verse is usually something like:

Jaybird sittin' on a hickory limb,
He looked at me and I looked at him,
Picked up a brickbat, hit him on the chin,
Great Godamighty, don't you do that again.

My theory on the hash Uncle Dave makes of it is that the A&R man, or perhaps Uncle Dave himself, decided that divine reference was disrespectful and it caused Uncle Dave to lose track and mess up the verse. He was a pretty good improviser on the spot, but this one tied him in knots."

**
4. Jim Dixon, Date: 20 May 09 - 09:06 PM
"From an article "Some Play-Party Games of the Middle West" by Edwin F. Piper, in The Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol XXVIII, 1915, page 281:

B.

(Western Iowa, 1900.)

1. First your heel, and then your toe,
And I'll take sugar in my coffee, O.

2. How do you think my mammy knows,
I take sugar in my coffee, O.

3. Cornstock fiddle and a shoestring bow,
And I take sugar in my coffee, O.

4. Sugar's high and coffee's low,
And I take sugar in my coffee, O."

**
5. GUEST,Joanne Stevenson, Date: 14 Oct 10 - 11:17 PM
"My children's British kindergarten teacher taught us in Canada in the 70s

I don't know how the old folks know
I like sugar in my coffee-o

Wind blows high, wind blows low
Blows my sugar and coffee-o

Oh what do I do with the baby-o
What do I do with the baby-o
What do I do with the baby-o
Take him to his mammy-o"

**
6. Azizi, Date: 16 Sep 12 - 10:07 AM
"For those who may be interested, this page on my Cocojams website http://cocojams.com/content/sugar-my-coffee-o-fiddle-song-early-sources-examples is a compilation of information, comments about and text examples of the song "Sugar In My Coffee O".[website no longer available]

Included in that page are several posts from this thread and from another Mudcat thread. That page also includes other examples such as this US civil war recollection:

 "I got up this morning whistling 'Sugar In The Coffee', one of the old tunes of that day. I want to tell where I first heard it. Uncle Burns Malone and his cousin, Jack Malone, waked me up in the night back in 1868, singing that old song."http://www.granburydepot.org/z/biog/malone.htm 
[Pancocojams Editor's Note 10/21/2022: Here's some information about that link: 
 "Hood County Texas Genealogical Society; Biographical Note: The William Burns Malone Family;
Experiences Of Early Settlers....Hood County Genealogical Society Newsletter No. 14; No. 1; May 1996"]
-end of additional information-

And this version from Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 5, April 1939, page 32-33 and quoted on that same online site:

"How in the world did you all know
I like sugar in my coffee so?
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
But I like sugar in my coffee so.

I had a girl named Sally, Oh,
But she won't put sugar in my coffee so.
Up in the hollar the cowbells ring,
The hound dog barks, and the hoot owl sing.

I had a girl Sweet Nancy,
I asked her if she'd marry me.
She says, "I like your manners so,
And I like sugar in my coffee too." "

****
Thanks for visiting pancocojams.

Visitor comments are welcome.

Additional Lyric Versions For & Comments About "Uncle Eph's Got The Coon" (with comments about "eephing")

Music City Roots, Feb. 13, 2010

Tennessee Mafia Jug Band performing "Uncle Eef" live at Music City Roots on 1.20.2010

****
Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part II of a two part pancocojams series about the song "Uncle Eph's Got The Coon". 

This post showcases a sound file of "Uncle Eph's Got The Coon" and presents selected comments from two Mudcat Folk Music Forum discussion threads about this song.

Information about the vocal technique called "eephing" which is performed in the beginning of this showcased song file is given in the Addendum to this post. 

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/07/information-about-coon-songs-some.html  for Part I of this pancocojams series. That post showcases another sound file of "Uncle Eph's Got The Coon" and presents some lyrics for versions of this song.

 The content of this post is presented for historical and folkloric purposes.

 All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who have collected this song. Thanks to Tennessee Mafia Jug Band for their music,  thanks to all those who are quoted in this post, and thanks to the publisher of this song file on YouTube.

****

LYRICS AND OTHER ONLINE COMMENTS ABOUT "UNCLE EPH'S GOT THE COON"

From https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=48470&messages=20

[Numbers are added for referencing purposes only.]

1.
Subject: Background of Brother Ephus
From: Dave Swan
Date: 11 Jun 02 - 01:38 PM

"My partners and I are arranging Brother Ephus for performance. We hope the song(particularly the chorus) can be taken at face value as a racoon hunting song. However, it has been suggested (and we can't find a definitive source one way or the other) that the chorus concerns a runaway slave.

"Where you going, Moses?, None of your business, Come here Moses, I ain't a gonna do it" may indicate a call and response between the captor and slave.

Certainly we don't want to sing a song which we don't understand, especially when it concerns something as important as this. At his point we just don't know enough.

I'd be grateful for anyone's input, a reference, or a citation.

Thanks,

Dave"

**

2.
Subject: RE: Background of Brother Ephus
From: Chicken Charlie
Date: 11 Jun 02 - 08:08 PM
"OK, but if he left "me" barking up the tree, then "I" must be his dog. Ephus, the hunter, took the coon and left the dog (Moses) barking up the empty tree.

Reminds me of a dog I once had who treed a cat ONCE and never again in her life passed that tree without looking for the cat. No, that doesn't mean a darn thing; just rather comical.

The 'preacher don't steal' verse is generic, as I'm sure you know, and wanders from song to song. In less happy times it would have been, 'a n-----* won't steal' and in the sixties sometimes became 'a hippie won't steal.'

As to not singing songs not understood, this is a laudable standard, but if it were universally adopted, no one would be able to sing "Horse with No Name." Ever."...
-snip-
*This is the way this word is written in that discussion thread.

**
3.
Subject: RE: Background of Brother Ephus
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 11 Jun 02 - 09:53 PM

"See thread 9197, with which this one ought to be combined: Uncle Ef's

The song ("Brother Ephus" in the DT,  cobbled or put-together by Hedy West, is derived from several minstrel and Negro folk songs and spirituals. The first verse has been reported since 1909 (Mississippi), but parts are much older. Newman L. White, 1928, American Negro Folk Songs, p. cites fragments under the title:

BROTHER EBEN'S GOT A COON

Uncle Eph'm got the coon and gone on, gone on, gone on.
Uncle Eph'm got de coon and gone on,
And left me watching up de tree.

White says this verse was used as a refrain after a stanza that had antecedents in several old minstrel books.

This same song was reported by Scarborough, 1925, from Virginia (Brother Ephram).

BROTHER EBEN'S GOT A COON
Brother Eban's got a coon,
And gone on, gone on,
Brother Eban's got a coon,
And gone on, gone on.

Also reported by White, Durham, NC, 1919 from Ms.

White comments that "While hunting coon is almost unknown in the Negro folk songs of today, it was a commonplace in the old minstrel song books of the 1840s and 1850s," p. 223, 1965, reprinted by facsimile from the edition of 1928.

As already pointed out, the verse about stealing watermelon appears commonly:

Some folks say dat er preacher won't steal,
But I caught one in my cornfield.
He had er bushel, his wife had er peck,
De baby had a roastin' ear hung er round his neck.

Reported from Alabama, 1915-1918, "sung by cornfield Negroes." From White, (see above), p. 372.

An older one:

Some folks say dat n—gers* won't steal,
I kotch one in my cornfield.
I ax him 'bout de corn, he call me a liar,
I up wid a chunk and knock him in de fiar.

White says that the version possibly came from the tidewater region of VA or NC, where "chunk" means to throw. The verse above is from "Negro Singers' Own Book, 1846(?), p. 411, in 'Whar You Cum From', by J. B. Harper, the "Celebrated Delineator of Comic and Aethiopian characters." It is probable that this song is "responsible for many others, including numerous blues, beginning 'What Some Folks Say.'" Quoted from White, p. 270, reference given above.

The last three lines of another:

But I caught three in my cornfield.
I ran dem through a pine thicket,
Stove my head in a yellow jacket nest.

and:

I caught two in my tater fiel',
One had a shovel and the other had a hoe,
If that ain't stealin' I don't know.

(The first from NC, the second from AL).

 

"Where you goin', Moses," is related to:

Whar you goin', buzzard;
Whar you goin', crow?
Gwine down to de low groun
To git mah grubbin' hoe.

According to White, this could be a verse from the old Jim Crow song used by Thomas D. Rice in the 1830s (named for an old slave, Jim Crow, met by Rice in Louisiana).

There are a number of verses that the one about the slippers is related to:

What kind of clothes do the angels wear, Ugh! Ugh!
What kind of clothes do the abgels wear, Ugh! Ugh!

Oh, my --- etc., an "upstart crow" from the Negro spiritual,

"What Kind of Shoes Are You Going to Wear," see Negro Spirituals, or the Songs of the Jubilee Singers, No. 47, ed. T. F. Seward, pre-1900.

Similar verses in "Negro Folk Rhymes," Thomas W. Talley, 1991, Univ. Tennessee Press."
-snip-
*This word is fully spelled out in this comment.

**

4.
Subject: RE: Background of Brother Ephus
From: Sorcha
Date: 11 Jun 02 - 10:32 PM

"Lyrics really sound like an escaped slave/"n--ger*" song to me.....but what do I know?"
-snip-
*This word is fully spelled out in this comment.

**

5.
Subject: RE: Background of Brother Ephus
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 11 Jun 02 - 10:56 PM

Sorcha, I presume you refer to the first verse. It could be.

Some have insisted that the verse relates to a lynching. The experts, however, relate it to normal hunting for the coon, possum, or whatever. Only a little change in the lyrics (so-called folk process) can completely obscure the original intent. We can never identify the original.

The other problem is that, at this late date, attempting to separate Negro and minstrel songs from each other is impossible. Too much borrowing, back and forth.

The verse about stealing corn (or whatever) has been the subject of jokes (as long as the buckshot doesn't get you) with farmers and humorists world-wide."
-snip-
I added italics to this sentence to highlight it.

**

6.
Subject: RE: Background of Brother Ephus
From: Dave Swan
Date: 12 Jun 02 - 02:44 PM

"It isn't a question for me of there being one right way to do this song. As long as I'm unsure about the references of this song I'll be uncomfortable with singing it, and that will show. I can't arbitrarily give a song meaning if it means something else.

Other's mileage may vary, but I've got to know what I'm talking (singing) about before I can make a decision about whether I want to take the song any farther, and make a decision about performance.

I don't fear doing songs which require a historical perspective, or some audience education. Nor do I fear saying this one's not right for me/this audience/this event. But, for me, I'm not giving the audience its money's worth, nor pleasing myself if, on some level, I'm saying "I'm not really sure what this song is about, but I'm going to sing it anyway." "

**

7.
Subject: RE: Background of Brother Ephus
From: Dave Swan
Date: 07 Apr 03 - 09:15 PM

"Interesting to see this thread raised again. In the end, we don't do this song. Too many questions were answered with references to escaped slave songs. Enough for us not to do it.

Thanks to everyone who has rung in here. Your suggestions and points of view have helped in many ways."

**

8.
Subject: RE: Background of Brother Ephus
From: GUEST,Booklyn Rose
Date: 30 Jun 22 - 05:44 PM

"I'm reading "the Beautiful Music All Around Us" by Stephen Wade. He discusses ten field recordings from the Library of Congress collection - discussing the circumstances under which they were recorded (in the 1930's & 1940's) and discussing the singers and the communities from which they came. He writes over and over about the influences of minstrel songs, recorded songs from jukeboxes, and songs from oral tradition, and how they are mixed and reinterpreted by different singers. My guess about Brother Ephus is that there is no one definitive version and no single meaning. “…

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ADDENDUM: INFORMATION AND COMMENTS ABOUT "EEPHING"

[comments from the discussion thread for this showcased video]

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOCaS2WvjAY

1.wepecket, 2010
"And Leroy Troy's vocalizations at the beginning are known as "eephers." "

**
2.  jeremiah lindstrom, 2013
"It may be spelled "Eeph" but its pronounced EEP."

**
Reply
3. Two Spirit Banjo, 2017
"jeremiah lindstrom Nah, it's pronounced as it is spelled. Uncle Eeph (or Eef) is spelled that way because the song (as Leroy showed us) uses "Eefing" which is the Appalachian equivalent to the German Jodel"

**
From http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=119521 
Subject: Eephing (type of vocal technique or 'mouth music')
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 19 Mar 09 - 02:00 PM

"Eephing is an old-time country style of vocal percussion somewhat similar to the recent "beatboxing" performed by hip-hop artists.

It is sometimes spelled eaphing, eefing, or eafing, but it is not related to effing or F'ing, a euphemism for f**king.

I call it percussion only because it sounds like percussion—it is much more rhythmic than melodic. It doesn't literally involve hitting anything, but it is often accompanied by truly percussive techniques like hamboning....

"From Dictionary of American Regional English by Frederic Gomes Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985): https://books.google.com/books?id=vAr2T4Bh7nkC&pg=PA275

Eephing vbl n [Echoic] Cf hoodling, whoop B

Creating wordless vocal music made up of nonsense syllables and percussive sounds; also n eaf such music.

1971 in 1978 I'm on My Journey Home (Phonodisc) wTN, [My maternal uncle] called it hoodlin'; they call it eephin' now. He [=the uncle] got it from somebody at a dance up at Dyersburg, Tennessee. 1978 Wolfe I'm on My Journey Home 2/1, [Liner notes:] Eephing (or hoodling) is one of a number of vocal-percussive effects still found in the mid-South....[It can be]...created by tickling...[the] throat...altering...[the] mouth cavity...tapping the cheeks....It has been reported in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi....Eephing has also been found among Afro-Americans. It is customarily performed informally in relaxed social situations. 1978 Dance Shuckin' & Jivin' 323 VA [Black], Have you ever heard this thing called "The Eaf"? Ee-poop-se-de-da-pa-de-da....Well, Bill Robinson [1878-1949, also known as "Mr. Bojangles"] and I used to go around and say that thing [=a long rhyme]...And then we start singing, "Ee-doop, se-da-da-pa-de-da-pa-pop!" "...
-snip-
This is the way that "f" word is given in that comment.  

I quoted these mudcat comments in the pancocojams post  entitled "Fats Waller - Eep, Ipe, Wanna Piece Of Pie (sound file, lyrics, & information)". http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2017/01/fats-waller-eep-ipe-wanna-piece-of-pie.html . The "eep, ipe" portion of that title is a form of "eephing" that lives on in versions of contemporary hand clap rhyme "Ooh Ah I Wanna Pie Of Pie".   

Here's another comment from that same Mudcat discussion thread:

Subject: RE: Eephing (type of vocal technique or 'mouth music') From: GUEST,Michael Garber Date: 27 Sep 17 - 11:33 AM Thanks for all this information. I've been collecting info for twelve years about eephing, and the result is an article about to come out in American Music (academic journal), but until today I never thought to check the Mudcat Cafe site (I feel so stupid -- often!) and never noticed about the song Fats Waller recorded until I heard it on a CD a few days ago. Thanks so much for the info on that song. The article is in press, I think, so I don't think I can add a citation to this great thread. In brief: The term "eeph" and "eephing" seems to first turn up in relation to a performance team of the 1890s, Williamson and Stone. Stone (the brother of star Fred Stone) died young; Williamson only revived his eephing briefly in 1918. But phrases relating to it, including the "gimme a piece of pie" reference, turn up in dribs and drabs through the decades. And what Jimmy Riddle calls "hoodling" also appears briefly here and there, including in the Cliff Edwards work mentioned in this string, and the "Swamp Root" recording you mention above, but also in a (very) few other places."

****
This concludes Part II of this two part pancocojams series.

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Visitor comments are welcome.

Information About Coon Songs & Some Lyrics For "Uncle Eph's Got The Coon"

Hank fan Hank fan, Feb 4, 2021

A silly ditty from everybody's favorite grandpa! This one was released on #KingRecords 867, the "A" side to "Five-String Banjo Boogie" …

****
Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part I of a two part pancocojams series about the old time song "Uncle Eph's Got The Coon" (or similar titles including "Uncle Ephraim's Got The Coon", "Brother Ephraim", and "Brother Ephus".)

This post showcases a sound file of "Uncle Eph's Got The Coon" and presents selected comments from two Mudcat Folk Music Forum discussion threads about this song.

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/07/additional-lyric-versions-for-comments.html for Part II of this pancocojams series. That post showcases another sound file of "Uncle Eph's Got The Coon" and presents additional lyric versions, comments about that song sources, floating verses, and possible meaning/s.

The content of this post is presented for historical and folkloric purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who have collected this song. Thanks to Grandpa Jones for his musical legacy, thanks to all those who are quoted in this post, and thanks to the publisher of this song file on YouTube.

****
INFORMATION ABOUT COON SONGS
The word "coon" has two English meanings, both of which are (or were) widely known in the United States :
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coon
"Definition of coon

1: RACCOON

2. offensive —used as an insulting and contemptuous term for a Black person

First Known Use of coon

1742, in the meaning defined at sense 1"

**
Here's some information about the term "coon songs" which used the second meaning of "coon" as given above:
Excerpt #1
From https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2005/may.htm What Were Coon Songs?
"The term coon did not originally appear as a racial slur term for a Black American, though over a short period of time it evolved into that. In early minstrel songs, the "coon" was reference to a raccoon, whose meat was supposedly preferred by plantation slaves. In many cases, for unknowing composers, the term "coon" became entangled with the 'possum, also thought to be a preferred food source. Apparently, many composers were not very familiar with American wildlife and could not tell the difference. As a result, "coon" and "possum" were often used in the same context. The earliest use of the possum term in a song was in the 1830 work by Charles Matthews, A Possum Up A Tree. By the mid 19th century, coon and possum songs were a regular part of the musical scene, most often heard performed in minstrel shows.

[...]

In Vaudeville, coon songs also flourished and a rather odd performance convention emerged; white females became the favored deliverers and were called "coon shouters." Foremost among the coon shouters was one May Irwin. Her performance of the Charles Trevathan hit The Bully Song (1896) was influential in establishing the stereotype of the razor toting, jealously belligerent black male. Also, this song has perhaps the worst racist lyrics of any song I have seen for a while. Once this level of ugliness was reached, it seemed that composers piled it on higher and deeper. Other coon songs soon exploited every conceivable black characteristic, real or imagined, for its comic possibilities. African-American aspirations to a place in society, food preferences, the imagined inclination for crime, and gambling all were exploited. The final insult was a number of songs where there was an imagined desire by all African Americans to become white as in the song, She's Gettin' Mo' Like The White Folks Every Day.

Sadly, even black songwriters produced songs as fully demeaning of their own race as those by white composers. The worst of these was Ernest Hogan's All Coons Look Alike To Me. The most prolific of the black composers to join in was Bob Cole who wrote dozens of songs such as No Coons Allowed and I Wonder What The Coon's Game Is?

Just as with the earlier minstrel shows, skits, entertainers and entire shows were developed from the coon song and many coon songs found their way into the legitimate theater as a part of productions. Even the great John Philip Sousa's famous band popularized some of the melodies and performed a number of them both at home and abroad. One of Sousa's assistants, Arthur Pryor, even composed some coon songs himself to keep the supply coming to the band. At the peak of its popularity, the coon song was everywhere and just about every songwriter in the country worked to fill the seemingly insatiable demand.

In their time, coon songs spoke volumes about white attitudes towards African Americans. Unfortunately, in many cases they also spoke volumes about some black composers' sense of personal pride and self image. They are an historical document that clearly shows white attitudes and the terribly oppressive social world that African Americans had to cope with."...

** 
Excerpt #2
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon_song#:~:text=Coon%20songs%20were%20a%20genre,identified%20with%20%22coon%22%20epithet.
"Coon songs were a genre of music that presented a stereotype of Africans. They were
popular in the United States and Australia from around 1880[1] to 1920,[2] though the earliest such songs date from minstrel shows as far back as 1848, when they were not yet identified with "coon" epithet.[3] The genre became extremely popular, with white and black men[4] giving performances in blackface and making recordings. Women known as coon shouters also gained popularity in the genre.[5] "

****
LYRICS AND OTHER ONLINE COMMENTS ABOUT "UNCLE EPH'S GOT THE COON"

[Numbers are added for referencing purposes only.)

ONLINE SOURCE #1
From https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=9197

1.
Subject: Lyr Add: UNCLE EPH'S GOT THE COON
From: Nathan Sarvis
Date: 18 Feb 99 - 08:48 AM

Old Uncle Eph was a good old soul.
He washed his face in the butter bowl,
Bumped his head on the mantle piece,
And fell right into a bucket of grease.

(Chorus)

Uncle Eph's got the coon and gone on,
Gone on, gone on.
Uncle Eph's got the coon and gone on,
And left us lookin' up a tree.

Wake up, sister. Don't you sleep so late.
Keep your eye on the golden gate.
Get up and dance by the light of the moon.
See Uncle Eph come fetching in the coon.

What kind of slippers do the angels wear,
Slippin' and slidin' on the golden stairs?
Golden slippers and silver socks.
Drop your nickel in the missionary box.

When Ephraim told this world goodbye,
He went to heaven to his home on high,
Told Saint Peter to make room.
Here comes Ephraim, fetchin' in the coon."

** 
2.
Subject: RE: Uncle Ef's Got the Coon
From: Joshua Newman
Date: 23 Feb 99 - 03:21 PM

"This sounds very like "Brother Ephus," which I believe Jody Stecher recorded ... though now that I've looked, I see I claimed to have learned it from Hedy West (what has become of Hedy West?)...

CHO: Where you going, Moses None of your business Come here, Moses Ain't gonna do it Brother Ephus got a coon and gone on, gone on, gone on Brother Ephus got a coon and gone on Left me barking up a tree

If you search for "Brother Ephus" in the Digital Tradition you'll find it."
-snip-
"Digital Tradition" (also given as "Digital Tradition Index" and "DT" is an archve of lyrics for (mostly) American folk music that is "housed" on the Mudcat Folk Music Forum website.

**
3. 
Subject: Lyr Add: UNCLE REUBEN GOT A COON
From: Joe_F
Date: 22 Mar 03 - 07:17 PM

"Possibly related, tho very different after the first stanza:

"UNCLE REUBEN GOT A COON"

on "Tom Glazer, Richard Dyer-Bennett Sing Olden Ballads"

REFRAIN:

Uncle Reuben got a coon, done gone, chck-a-chck,
Done gone, chck-a-chck, done gone, chck-a-chck,
Uncle Reuben got a coon, done gone, chck-a-chck,
And left me here behind.

Possum on the simmon tree, raccoon on the ground,
Possum say "Mr Raccoon, won't you shake one simmon down.

If you love me, Liza Jane, put your hand in mine.
You won't lack for no corn bread as long as the sun do shine."

**
4. 
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Uncle Ef's Got the Coon
From: GUEST,Q
Date: 16 Aug 03 - 02:20 PM

"Both songs are put together from "Brother Eben's Got a Coon," and verses borrowed of parodied from a number of other songs. A Negro folk song version was collected in 1909 by Perrow. The Traditional ballad Index refers to a song from 1878 by Bob Allen, "Old Uncle Eph."

Uncle Eph'm got de coon and gone on, gone on, gone on,
Uncle Eph'm got the coon and gone on,
And left me wathing up de tree.

Newman I White, in American Negro Folk-Songs, 1928 (1965 reprint) says Perrow has this refrain after a stanza that has antecedents in old minstrel books, so the blackface minstrels may have been the source of the song. (White, # 37, p. 223)

Scarborough, 1925, found the same refrain, also in combination with old minstrel songs from the 1840s-1850s:

Brother Eben's got a coon,
And gone on, gone on,
Brother Eban's got a coon,
And gone on, gone on.

OLd Dan Tucker, Possum Up a Gum Stump, Liza Jane. Shake dem 'Simmons and a parody of Golden Slippers also have contributed.

The Traditional Ballad Index, cufresno, lists some recordings."

**
5.
Subject: Lyr Add: UNCLE EPHRAIM GOT DE COON
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 02 Jan 10 - 08:44 AM

From "Songs and Rhymes from the South" by E. C. Perrow, in The Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. 26 (Lancaster, Pa.: American Folk-Lore Society, 1913), page 158:

32. UNCLE EPHRAIM GOT DE COON

(From Mississippi; negroes; MS. of R. J. Slay; 19x19)

[1] As I was coming through my field,
A black snake bit me on de heel;
Dey carried me home, and laid me on de bed;
De ole folks said, "Dat n---er* is dead."

[CHORUS] Uncle Eph'm got de coon and gone on, gone on, gone on,
Uncle Eph'm got de coon and gone on,
And left me watching up de tree.

[2] What kind of shoes did de angels wear,
Slipping and sliding through de air?
A great big shoe and a gov'mint sox:
Just drap all de money in de missionary-box."
-snip-
*This word is fully spelled out in these lyrics.

**
6. 
Subject: Lyr Add: BROTHER EPHRUM GOT DE COON AND GONE ON
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 04 Jan 10 - 01:56 PM

From On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs by Dorothy Scarborough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), page 101:

An old song given me by Joseph A. Turner, of Hollins, Virginia, mentions a crude banjo. The music to this was written down for me by Ruth Hibbard, of Hollins College.

BROTHER EPHRUM GOT DE COON AND GONE ON

1. I went down to my pea-patch
To see if my ole hen had hatch.
Ole hen hatch and tellin' of her dream,
And de little chickens pickin' on de tambourine.

CHORUS: Brother Ephrum got de coon and gone on, and gone on, and gone on.
Brother Ephrum got de coon and gone on
And left me here behind.

2. I see a rabbit a-runnin' down de fiel';
I say, "Mister Rebbit, whar you gwine?"
She say, "I ain't got no time for to fool wid you,
Dar's a white man comin' on behind."

3. Marsa bought a yaller gal,
He brought her right from de South,
And de hayr on her head was wrop so tight
Dat de sun shone in her mouth.

4. Lips jes' like a cherry,
Cheeks jes' like a rose.
How I loves dat yaller gal
Lord Almighty knows!

5. I had a little banjo
De strings was made of twine,
And de only tune dat I could play
Was, I wish dat gal was mine!"
-snip-
“Yaller girl” (“yellow girl”) means a light skinned Black girl.

**
7. 
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Uncle Eph's Got the Coon
From: GUEST
Date: 27 Mar 18 - 04:20 PM

I remember learning this from a radio programme for schools as Uncle Reuben - it was probably the Singing Together programme, mentioned on other threads.

The melody was a hash together of one old-time tune for the verse with the chorus tune being closer to the more familiar Uncle Eph melody.

The song also contained a verse from a completely different song:

Raccoon's got a bushy tail;
Possum tail is bare.
Rabbit's got no tail at all,
But a little bunch of hair."...

****
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Visitor comments are welcome.

(1844 Old Time Music, Minstrel Song) - "Dandy Jim From Caroline" (video, information, comments, & lyrics)

MichaelTheResearcher, April 27, 2013

Here are my friends in the Camptown Shakers with "Dandy Jim From Caroline" (alternate title "Best Looking Fellow In The County"). This was filmed at the Neshaminy State Park Civil War Reenactment on April 20, 2013. Many photographs of the day can be found at this blog entry: http://michaeltheresearcher.blogspot....

-snip-
I can't decipher the vocals for this rendition of "Dandy Jim From Caroline". I chose this video to include an example of the tune, because of the instruments that are played in this video, and because of a comment in the video's discussion thread.

Here's that comment:
Anthony Ohagan, 2013
"I have in my possession a copy of an advertisement from an Irish newspaper from  1848 for THE ETHIOPIAN SERENADERS performing in Dundalk, Ireland on October the 8th.

The advertisement contains all the songs in their repertoire from the night which was during the time of the Great Irish Famine of the mid 19th century.

Dandy Jim from Caroline was one of their songs. Not the kind of music that many would associate with the Famine.

Thanks, lads for letting me hear that song at last"

****
Edited by Azizi Powell

Latest revision - Oct. 21, 2022

This pancocojams post showcases a video of a music group performing the 1844 song "Dandy Jim From Caroline". 

Some information and comments about that song are included in this post along with that song's lyrics and the definition for the English word "dandy".

The Addendum to this post provides some information about the Rhythm & Blues song "Jim Dandy" (also known as "Jim Dandy To The Rescue".)

The content of this post is presented for historical, cultural, and educational purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are featured in this post and thanks to all those who are quoted in this post. Thanks also to the publisher of this video on YouTube.

****
INFORMATION ABOUT & LYRICS THE SONG "DANDY JIM FROM CAROLINE"  
Note: The two forms of what is commonly called "the n word" are given in this pancocojams post with amended spelling.

Lyrics for some contemporary versions of this song replace that word with "fellow". 
From http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/minstrel/dandyjimfr.html

"Dandy Jim from Caroline

Baltimore: F. D. Benteen, 1844

[This song was published in 1844 by at least six publishers,

and in New York and Boston as well as in Baltimore. By different

publishers it was attributed it to Chas. Reps, Dan Emmet, Geo.

F. Bristow and J. T. Norton. The lyrics differ somewhat from

publisher to publisher.]

ARTISTS:

Japher's "Original" SANDY RIVER MINSTRELS

FIDDLE & BONES: Jack Nuckols; BANJO, VOCALS &

JAW HARP: Mark Meadows; TAMBOURINE: Stephanie Meadows."

I've often heard it said of late
Dat Souf Carolina was de state,
Whar handsome Ni&&ars* bound to shine,
Like "Dandy Jim from Caroline."
For my ole massa tole me so,
I was de best lookin Ni&&er* in de County O,
I look in de glass an I found it so,
Jus what massa told me O.

I drest myself from top to toe,
And down to Dinah I did go,
Wid pantaloons strapp'd down behine,
Like "Dandy Jim from Caroline."
For my ole massa &c.

De bull dog clar'd me out ob de yard,
I tought I'd better leabe my card,
I tied it fast to a piece ob twine,
Signed "Dandy Jim from Caroline."
For my ole massa &c.

She got my card an wrote me a letta,
An ebery word she spelt de betta,
For ebery word an ebery line,
Was "Dandy Jim from Caroline."
For my ole massa &c.

Oh, beauty it is but skin deep,
But wid Miss Dinah none compete;
She chang'd her name from lubly Dine,
To Mrs. Dandy Jim from Caroline."
For my ole massa &c.

An ebery little one we had,
Was de berry image ob he dad,
Dar heels stick out tree feet behine,
Like "Dandy Jim from Caroline."
For my ole massa &c.

I took dem all to church one day,
An hab dem christened widout delay,
De Preacher christened eight or nine,
Young Dandy Jim from Caroline.
For my ole massa &c.

An when de Preacher took he tea,
He seem'd to be berry much perplex,
For noting cum across he mine,
But "Dandy Jim from Caroline."
For my ole massa &c.
-snip-
*This word is fully spelled out in those lyrics.

****
DEFINITION FOR THE ENGLISH WORD "DANDY"
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dandy
"Dandy

plural dandies

Definition of dandy (Entry 1 of 2)

1: a man who gives exaggerated attention to personal appearance

2: something excellent in its class

a dandy of a game

dandy adjective

dandier; dandiest

Definition of dandy (Entry 2 of 2)

1: of, relating to, or suggestive of a man who gives exaggerated attention to personal appearance : FOPPISH"

****
SELECTED COMMENTS ABOUT THE SONG "DANDY JIM FROM CAROLINE"
These comments are from several Mudcat Folk Music Discussion Threads.

For the record, I participated in two of these discussions (given below as #1 and #3). In the first discussion thread that is given, I noted that some of the comments are missing probably because that website had crashed at some time or another.

1. From https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=81990
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Dandy Jim of Caroline
From: Snuffy
Date: 16 Jun 05 - 01:20 PM

" "Dandy Jim from South Carolina also appears in the shanty Nothing But A Humbug, collected in South Wales at the end of the 1920s. See this thread for details"
-snip-
The word “thread” is a hyperlink to https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=72368

****
2. From https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=72368#1463115
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: James M. Carpenter Shanties & Sea Songs
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 16 Apr 05 - 03:38 PM

"Interesting that the "Humbug" lines were taken from old minstrel songs.

"Dandy Jim from Caroline" was written in 1843 by Silas S. Steele and J. Richard Myers.

"Oh beauty is but skin deep,

But wid Miss Dinah none compete;

She changed her name from lubly Dine

To Mrs. Dandy Jim of Caroline." "

****
3. From https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=97735&messages=12#1935885

a)

Subject: Lyr Add: SUGAR IN COFFEE (from Thomas W. Talley)

From: Azizi

Date: 13 Jan 07 - 06:06 PM

 "SUGAR IN COFFEE

Sheep's in de meader a' mowin' o' de hay.
De honey's in de bee-gum, so dey all say.
My head's up an' I'se bound to go.
Who'll take sugar in de coffe-o?

I'se de prettiest liddle gal in de country-o.
My mammy an' daddy, dey bofe say so.
I looks in de glass, it don't say no.
So I'll take sugar in de coffee-o.

Source: Thomas W. Talley "Negro Folk Rhymes", originally published 1922"

****

b)

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Prettiest Little Girl in the County-O

From: Richie
Date: 13 Jan 07 - 11:50 PM

From the MP3 of Sweet Dandy Jim of Caroline by Japher's "Original" SANDY RIVER MINSTRELS.

For my ole massa tole me so,

I was de best lookin *feller in de County O,

I look in de glass an I found it so,

Jus what massa told me O.

*edited

The Prettiest Little Girl originated from the chorus of Dandy Jim from Caroline (posted above). It was published in Baltimore by F. D. Benteen in 1844.

[This song was published in 1844 by at least six publishers,

and in New York and Boston as well as in Baltimore. By different

publishers it was attributed it to Chas. Reps, Dan Emmet, Geo.

F. Bristow and J. T. Norton. The lyrics differ somewhat from

publisher to publisher.]"  "

****
ADDENDUM: 1956 R&B SONG "JIM DANDY TO THE RESCUE"
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Dandy_(song)
" "Jim Dandy" (sometimes known as "Jim Dandy to the Rescue") is a song written by Lincoln Chase, and was first recorded by American R&B singer LaVern Baker in 1956. It reached the top of the R&B chart[1] and #17 on the pop charts in the United States. It was named one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll and was ranked #352 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.[2]

The song is about a man (Jim Dandy) who rescues women from improbable or impossible predicaments.[1] It proved popular enough that Chase wrote a second song for Baker entitled "Jim Dandy Got Married."[1]

The American English term jim-dandy for an outstanding person or thing predates the song; first attested in 1844, it may itself come from the title of an old song, "Dandy Jim of Caroline".[3] "...
-snip-
Both Lincoln Chase and LaVern Baker were African American.

It's interesting that there is a Wikipedia page for "Jim Dandy To The Rescue" but no Wikipedia page for "Dandy Jim From Caroline".

Update: Oct. 21, 2022: Instead of a Wikipedia page, I found this link:
  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dandy_Jim_from_Caroline.jpg
 
****
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Visitor comments are welcome.

2019 Article Excerpt About Black Musicians And United States "Old Time", "String Band" Music

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents an excerpt of a 2019 New Yorker article by John Jeremiah Sullivan entitled "Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means".

The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, and educational purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to John Jeremiah Sullivan for writing this article and thanks to all of the musicians who are featured in this article.

****
ARTICLE EXCERPT 
from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/rhiannon-giddens-and-what-folk-music-means
"Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means" by  John Jeremiah Sullivan *,  May 20, 2019 

The roots musician is inspired by the evolving legacy of the black string band.

"To grasp the significance of what the twenty-first-century folksinger Rhiannon Giddens has been attempting, it is necessary to know about another North Carolina musician, Frank Johnson, who was born almost two hundred years before she was. He was the most important African-American musician of the nineteenth century, but he has been almost entirely forgotten. Never mind a Wikipedia page—he does not even earn a footnote in sourcebooks on early black music. And yet, after excavating the records of his career—from old newspapers, diaries, travelogues, memoirs, letters—and after reckoning with the scope of his influence, one struggles to come up with a plausible rival.

There are several possible reasons for Johnson’s astonishing obscurity. One may be that, on the few occasions when late-twentieth-century scholars mentioned him, he was almost always misidentified as a white man, despite the fact that he had dark-brown skin and was born enslaved. It may have been impossible, and forgivably so, for academics to believe that a black man could have achieved the level of fame and success in the antebellum slave-holding South that Johnson had. There was also a doppelgänger for scholars to contend with: in the North, there lived, around the same time, a musician named Francis Johnson, often called Frank, who is remembered as the first black musician to have his original compositions published. Some historians, encountering mentions of the Southern Frank, undoubtedly assumed that they were merely catching the Northern one on some unrecorded tour and turned away.

There is also the racial history of the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Johnson enjoyed his greatest fame. In 1898, a racial massacre in Wilmington, and a subsequent exodus of its black citizens, not only knocked loose the foundations of a rising black middle class but also came close to obliterating the deep cultural memory of what had been among the most important black towns in the country for more than a century. The people who might have remembered Johnson best, not just as a musician but as a man, were themselves violently unremembered.

A final explanation for Johnson’s absence from the historical record may be the most significant. It involves not his reputation but that of the music he played, with which he became literally synonymous—more than one generation of Southerners would refer to popular dance music simply as “old Frank Johnson music.” And yet, in the course of the twentieth century, the cluster of styles in which Johnson specialized––namely, string band, square dance, hoedown––came to be associated with the folk music of the white South and even, by a bizarre warping of American cultural memory, with white racial purity. In the nineteen-twenties, the auto magnate Henry Ford started proselytizing (successfully) for a square-dancing revival precisely because the music that accompanied it was not black. Had he known the deeper history of square dancing, he might have fainted.

As a travelling “Negro fiddler,” Johnson epitomized the one musical figure in American history who can truly be called “ur.” Black fiddlers are the trilobites of American musical history. A legal record from the mid-seventeenth century details a dispute between Virginia households competing for the services of an enslaved man who had played the fiddle all night for a party on the Eastern Shore. After that, for more than two hundred years, black fiddlers are everywhere in the written sources. Then, around the start of the twentieth century, they fade, abruptly and almost completely.

Johnson was born in the late eighteenth century, most likely on a plantation owned by a family named Hawkins, in North Carolina, near the Virginia border. Early on, he was recognized as a prodigy who could master almost any instrument, but his specialty was the fiddle—the instrument most desired for dances. His owners started hiring him out for parties and dividing the earnings with him, a common practice. Sometime in the eighteen-thirties or forties, he became free. The only attempt at a biographical treatment of him, an article written around 1900 by the Virginia newspaperman Frank S. Woodson, says that he bought his own freedom “on a credit,” using money that he had made playing music. He then, according to Woodson, purchased the freedom of his wife, a seamstress named Amelia. His former master “threw in the five or six children, all boys, for good measure.” The boys became his band. Johnson and his wife tended to produce talented sons.

What did they sound like? It is a profound frustration, for a person interested in early African-American music, not to be able to hear them. Johnson died ten years before the recording era began, and by then his influence had grown diffuse. But a defining quality of his band’s sound is how much mixing it involved—how many styles and instrumental arrangements. There were brass instruments and wind instruments. Johnson’s sons played horns of all kinds. Frank, Jr., played a snare drum. There was a bass drum. Cymbals. In 1853, a kettledrum was introduced. But there were also the instruments we associate more closely with a “minstrel” band—fiddles and banjos. A fife-and-drum sound is mentioned in a Wilmington Daily Journal article published in 1858. Johnson’s band played everything at once, moving across a range of stylistic attacks, all geared for dancing. It seems impossible that its sound would not have approached, at times, proto-jazz.

It is a genuine challenge to describe how prevalent Johnson was, how dominant. According to one source, he had “for half a century ruled with absolute autocracy the aristocratic ball-rooms of the South.” By any calculus, he was one of the first black celebrities in the South. I have never come across an ostensibly “lost” figure who, once you know to look for him, turns out to have left behind such an obvious trail. Johnson went from being hard to find to being impossible to escape. Researching him was like writing a history of baseball and “rediscovering” a hitter named Babe Ruth. His music was so woven into the social life of the South that it would not be an exaggeration to describe it as a kind of ever-present soundtrack. Plantation balls, picnics, barbecues, sporting events, Renaissance-style “tilting” tournaments (they were big for a while), random town ceremonies (think cornerstone-layings), university commencements (for many years, he performed at Chapel Hill, and for at least some years at Wake Forest), state fairs, agricultural fairs, firemen’s balls, military “muster days,” moonlight excursions on trains and boats, extended summer bookings at resort hotels, society weddings, holiday parties (including an annual Christmas party in Wilmington, where his band performed for mixed audiences, “thereby creating a warmer fellowship between the races,” according to the Wilmington Star), funeral processions, and political rallies. In 1840, “when the new Capitol building was completed in Raleigh,” according to an item in an 1873 issue of the Hillsboro Recorder, there were “two successive nights” of dancing, with “the well-known Frank Johnson . . . furnishing the music.” During the Civil War, his band often marched at the head of regiments and was called in to play at recruitment parties. According to a story recounted by Woodson, Johnson accompanied a Confederate brigade into battle, but turned around when the shooting started.

Johnson fell on hard times after the war, and, in the end, according to a 1901 piece written by someone with the initials A.M.W., he “moved about a pathetic figure—a sort of melancholy reminder of departed joys.” His death, in 1871, was reported all over—in Cincinnati, in Chicago. One newspaper in Wilmington described the turnout for his funeral as “the largest, we think, that has ever occurred in this city, it being estimated that there were at least two thousand persons in the procession, including the colored fire companies in uniform, with standards draped in mourning, the colored Masonic fraternity in regalia, etc., the whole preceded by a brass band.” Pine Forest Cemetery, where he was buried, is down the street from my house; I’ve spent countless days looking in vain for his grave.

Johnson’s flame never quite flickered out. Other fiddlers followed in his nimble footsteps. Some of them had played with him; all of them had heard his band. Pomp Long, a fiddler whose owner, according to the Richmond Leader, had “placed him under Frank Johnson when he recognized his natural talent,” was briefly considered a rival to Johnson in ability. Then came Cripple Dick Foster, Uncle Baldy, Dick Jumper, Blind Lige, Emp Wright—each with his moment on the mountain.

Wright, who seems to have been active in the years just before 1900, was one of the last pure products of the Frank Johnson school. He knew how to make fiddles. There is some confusion over whether he was black or white. He supposedly lived for a time in a “mulatto community” called Little Texas, near Greensboro, North Carolina.  One of the few things we know about him is that he mentored, and passed his internal songbook on to, a man named John Arch Thompson, who lived in various rural pockets of the Piedmont: Cedar Grove and Cheeks (both in Orange County) and, finally, in Mebane (pronounced “meh-bun”), north of Greensboro.

Thompson had a son named Joe, and Thompson’s brother had a son, Odell. The first cousins played the fiddle and the banjo, respectively, for small house parties. A folklorist named Kip Lornell got turned on to them in the nineteen-seventies, and other researchers published interviews with them and recorded them playing. The Thompson cousins performed at some folk festivals. Then Odell died, and only Joe was left. He was the last of the old line, the rag end of whatever Johnson started. Or he would have been. Something happened fourteen years ago, in Boone, North Carolina, to change the story.

In 2005, a festival called the Black Banjo Then & Now Gathering took place at Appalachian State University, in Boone. Joe Thompson was an honored guest and a featured performer. Many of the attendees had come expressly to see him. Among the scholars and the players and the scholar-players were three passionate young revivalists, black musicians who had been getting lost in the old stuff. Two of them were multi-instrumentalists: Justin Robinson, from the mill town of Gastonia, North Carolina, had studied the violin since childhood, and Dom Flemons, at the time still living in his native Arizona, had already begun turning himself into an old-fashioned songster. They were walking around and, for the first time, seeing people with faces like theirs who were digging, and making, the kind of music they loved.

The third musician, a twenty-eight-year-old singer from Greensboro, was starting to experiment with stringed instruments. She was Rhiannon Giddens (pronounced “ree-ann-un,” like in the Fleetwood Mac song, after which she was, surprisingly, not named). She had recently graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where she focussed on opera, and had only begun wading into the muddier waters of what the cultural critic Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America.” Her background was in youth choir and art song, but, since college, she had become increasingly interested in her home ground. Thanks to a job as a hostess at a Macaroni Grill, where her duties included singing old Italian arias, she earned enough to buy a ninety-nine-dollar Chinese fiddle and her first banjo, a Deering Goodtime. She had read “African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia,” by Cecelia (Cece) Conway, and was corresponding with the author. Conway told her that Joe Thompson was still playing and that he would be performing in Boone.

“And I went, ‘What?’ ” Giddens recalled, not long ago. “I was just starting to understand the history, and here was the man, practically in my back yard.  It was proof of what I’d been reading about, living proof that this stuff had a place in my community.”

I first met Giddens one afternoon in the spring of 2015, in the kitchen of a cozy Greensboro ranch house she’d recently bought. It was the first of many meetings and conversations throughout the past four years, a running discussion about the origins of the music she draws from, a style that she transforms in her playing, and which has been an obsession of mine for twenty-five years. That day, I started by asking her to describe Thompson.

“Joe?” Giddens said, and gave a characteristic sideways glance, drawing in her cheek and seeming to conjure him in her mind. “He always wore a button-up shirt, and dark pants and a hat—always a hat, like a trucker’s hat of some kind.” He was “formal and friendly all at once—very Southern that way.” She’d immediately noticed “how assured he was,” she said. “Like a rock, secure in his place in the world and in his purpose.” His purpose? “To play fiddle,” she said.

Thompson’s father had grown up playing music at “wood choppings” in rural Orange County. When Giddens and Thompson met, at the festival, Giddens mentioned that her grandmother Armintha (Mint) Morrow, who helped raise her, came from Mebane, too. From then on, Giddens said, “I was Miss Morrow.”

The trio called themselves the Carolina Chocolate Drops. In 2005, they started making trips to Mebane, to sit at Thompson’s feet. The formation of the band was inseparable from these pilgrimages. In playing with Thompson, they were learning to play with one another, and in reading his human songbook they established their own repertoire. Thompson had suffered a stroke in 2001, Giddens said, “but he was still pretty good for a while, and he played till he died.” There were barbecues at his house, and people from the town came, some to join in the playing, most to listen. Giddens watched his hands. Many of the songs he taught her, like “Old Mollie Hare” and “Polly Put the Kettle On,” were those we find in the handful of preserved Frank Johnson playlists.

[...] 

I asked what Thompson had been like as a teacher. Would he demonstrate licks?  “Nah,” she said. “We just played. That’s how it always was with Joe.” There wasn’t a banjo player in the group at that time, and, although Giddens had initially hoped to learn the fiddle from Thompson, she volunteered to play banjo because he didn’t really play without one. “That’s what we ladies do—what needs to be done,” she said. She had learned from Thompson what she called “the feel, the energy, the flow.” “The notes themselves,” she said, “were unimportant. It was, How did he engage with them?” She described his bowing as “magical, something you can’t break down. You just have to absorb. Sometimes I am playing and I hear him come out when I’m not thinking too hard.”

[...]

In the eighteen-nineties, a new political movement calling itself the Fusion Party—a multiracial group made up of white populists and radical Republicans, many of whom were black—was gaining power in North Carolina. Although much of the state was controlled by white supremacists, Wilmington had become a stronghold of Fusionist power. The wharves there had created work opportunities for free black people. After the Civil War, African-Americans in the city began to start businesses, own property, and win political office. In 1898, a local black newspaper editor, Alex Manly, published an editorial arguing that, as often as not, interracial relationships in the South were consensual. Democratic editors reprinted it over and over, for months, in newspapers friendly to the white- supremacist cause, deliberately fomenting a readiness for violent action among a large part of the state’s white citizenry.

On October 27th, Alfred Moore Waddell, a onetime Confederate colonel and a former U.S. congressman, whose career was in decline, gave a speech to hundreds of white supremacists from the stage at Thalian Hall, a big theatre downtown, advocating for a violent takeover. He declared that the whites of Wilmington would “have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live,” and that they were “resolved to change them, if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.” Two weeks later, on November 10th, Waddell went on to lead the takeover, marching at the front of a white-supremacist mob with a rifle over his shoulder. An unknown number of black people were murdered in daylight, and the progressive Republican city and county governments were overthrown. Some historians consider it the only successful political coup in American history.

Curiously, Waddell was “A.M.W.,” who, as the reader may recall, had remembered Frank Johnson in the musician’s decline and dotage. In fact, Waddell left us some of the most vivid portraits of Johnson, having seen him play at numerous balls in the eighteen-fifties. The fiddler, Waddell recalled in one essay, “usually wore a stovepipe hat, a stock of the old style, instead of a cravat, and a spike tail coat with brass buttons.” At a ball one night, while Waddell and a pretty girl were dancing together near the center of the dance floor, Johnson stepped down from the stand where he had been playing and walked up beside them and fiddled to them, for them. As Waddell recalled, Johnson, with the violin “still under his chin,” cried out, “That’s the thing! Please God, it reminds me of when I was young.”...

Published in the print edition of the May 20, 2019, issue, with the headline “Folk Like Us.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the Times Magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review. His forthcoming book is “The Prime Minister of Paradise.”

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