"On Top of Old Smoky" (often spelled "Smokey") is a traditional folk song and nursery rhyme of the United States. It is catalogued as Roud Folk Song Index No. 414. As recorded by the Weavers, the song reached the pop music charts in 1951.
In one version the first verse is the following;
History as folk song
It is unclear when, where, and by whom the song was first sung. In historical times, folk songs were the informal property of the communities that sang them, passed down through generations. They were published only when a curious person took the trouble to visit singers and document their songs, an activity that in America began only around the turn of the 20th century.See Folk song. For a detailed history of how Appalachian folk song was "discovered" around this time by scholars and other urbanites, see https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/filene-folk.html. For this reason, it is unlikely that an originator of "On Top of Old Smoky" could ever be identified.
One of the earliest versions of "On Top of Old Smoky" to be recorded in fieldwork was written down by the English folklorist Cecil Sharp, who during the First World War made three summer field trips to the Appalachian Mountains seeking folk songs, accompanied and assisted by Maud Karpeles. Sharp and Karpeles found to their delight that the Appalachians, then geographically isolated, were a strong preserve of traditional music and that many of the people they met were naturally gifted singers who knew a great number of songs.See Sharp's Preface to Sharps and Karpeles (1932). They were also intrigued to find that many of the songs the people sang to them were versions of songs Sharp had earlier collected from people in rural England, suggesting that the ancestors of the Appalachian residents had brought them over from the old country.
The version of "On Top of Old Smoky" that Sharp and Karpeles collected was sung to them on 29 July 1916 by Miss Memory Shelton in Alleghany, Madison County, North Carolina.See https://www.visitmadisoncounty.com/who-we-are/traditional-music-heritage/cecil-sharp/cecil-sharps-madison-county-singers/ ; . Shelton was part of a family of which several members sang for Sharp.See http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/shelton-family-madison-co-nc-sharp-efssa.aspx , as well as Sharp and Karpeles (1916) identifying Memory Shelton as daughter of Mrs. Noah Shelton. The first verse as she sang it was transcribed by Sharp and Karpeles as follows:Sharp and Karpeles (1932), vol. 2, song 64A
In the lyrics, sparking is a now-rare word that means "courting".Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, entry "spark". As can be seen, Memory Shelton also avoided the extreme prolongation of the syllables of Smoky and lover that are customary today, instead assigning just one musical beat to Smo- and lov- and two to -key and -er.Pete Seeger (1961:60-61) offered two versions of the song, one with prolonged notes, the other not. He commented on the difference, hinting that the prolonged-note version was his own: "The first version given here [prolonged notes] shows how some songs can be adapted slightly for group singing. At the bottom is the tune as it sounds better sung in the old solo way." The version with prolonged notes has, in small print, a representation of the "lining out" (spoken cuing of the next line for the group) that Seeger performed in his influential recording (see below) with the Weavers. The version Shelton sang has twelve verses. It was published twice: first in the preliminary volume of folk songs prepared by Sharp and Karpeles after their first summer of fieldwork (Sharp and Karpeles 1917), then in 1932 after Sharp's death, in the much larger compendium of Appalachian folk songs that Karpeles edited from the full notes of their three summers' fieldwork.
American fieldworkers were also active in the Appalachians. A (tuneless) text for "On Top of Old Smoky", similar to what Memory Shelton sang, was published by E. C. Perrow in 1915, slightly before Sharp's fieldwork.Perrow is not clear on where he got the text from; his label says: "From North Carolina; mountain whites; MS. written for E. N. Caldwell; 1913". E. C. Perrow (April–June 1915). "Songs and Rhymes from the South". The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 28, No. 108, pp. 129-190. . . . In the following decades, still further variants of "On Top of Old Smoky" were recorded by fieldworkers in North CarolinaSeven versions collected in North Carolina are given by Brown and White (1977:170-173). and Tennessee.A list (without words or music) of five versions is given in Edwin C. Kirkland (October–December 1946). "A Check List of the Titles of Tennessee Folksongs". The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 59, No. 234. pp. 423-476. . .
Alternative tunes and words The Appalachian tradition characteristically spawned multiple variants of the same song. In the extreme case, the same basic set of words could be sung to more than one tune, or the same tune could adopt a completely different set of words. The now-standard tune of "On Top of Old Smoky" competed with a completely different tune, which Sharp and Karpeles also encountered in the Appalachians, and versions of this tune were also found by later fieldworkers. It was known to Memory Shelton as well, who shared it with Sharp and Karpeles thus:Shelton's version appears only in Sharp and Karpeles's field notes; where is it crossed out, suggesting Memory Shelton preferred the now-familiar version better. Sharp and Karpeles published the alternative version in Sharp and Karpeles (1932), vol. 2, p. 127. Two further versions of the alternative tune, collected in the 1950s, were published in Brown and White (1977).
The tune of "On Top of Old Smoky" familiar to most people today was also paired with a completely different set of words in a folk song called "The Little Mohee", about a frontiersman who falls in love with an Indian maiden (or, in some versions, a sailor who falls in love with a South Seas maiden)."The Little Mohee" can be perused in Richard Chase (2014). American Folk Tales and Songs. Courier Corporation. Extract online at Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=88bAAwAAQBAJ&dq=little+mohee&pg=PA129. This tune was collected by the American fieldworkers Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway in Pine Mountain, KentuckyPine Mountain, KY is likewise in the Appalachians, 72 air miles (but a three hour drive) from Allegheny, N.C., where Memory Shelton sang. Data from Google Maps. from a singer named Mary Ann Bagley,Data from the Brown University archive of Wyman's field notes (p. 7), online at https://library.brown.edu/riamco/xml2pdffiles/US-RPB-ethno.arc.0128.pdf. The date of the field note entry is 8 May 1916. and published by them in 1916, hence a year before the Sharp/Karpeles version mentioned above.Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway (1916) Lonesome tunes: Folk songs from the Kentucky mountains. New York: H. W. Gray. The tune varies slightly from what is familiar today. The song may be viewed at Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=e1bkAAAAMAAJ&q=little+mohee.
Because the versions gathered in fieldwork vary so much, there is no particular version of "On Top of Old Smoky" that can lay claim to being the "authentic" or "original" version. The version that Sharp and Karpeles collected from Memory Shelton can be read online (see Sharp and Karpeles (1917), in References below), and the version by Pete Seeger that greatly popularized the song in modern times (see below) is also online.See http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/the_weavers/on_top_of_old_smokey.html.
Location of "Old Smoky" Old Smoky is plausibly a high mountain somewhere in the southern Appalachians, since so many versions recorded by fieldworkers were collected there. Possibilities include Kuwohi (then officially known as Clingman's Dome), named "Smoky Dome" by local Scotch-Irish inhabitants, but exactly which mountain it is may be lost to antiquity.
Emergence of the song in popular music
Cecil Sharp collected Appalachian folk songs just before the time when that music came to be "discovered" by the outside world and sold as a commercial product by the nascent recording industry,Williams (1995) gives 1923 as the first year that a folk musician was recorded for commercial purposes; this was a recording of the North Georgia fiddler John Carson by the Okeh Record Company. Williams, Michelle Ann (1995) Great Smoky Mountains Folk Life. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, p. 58 a development which would ultimately create the modern genre of country music. The first to make a commercial recording of "On Top of Old Smoky" was George Reneau, "The Blind Musician of the Smoky Mountains", who worked as a busker in Knoxville, Tennessee, just west of the Appalachians. In 1925, Reneau made the trip to New York City to record the song, and others, for Vocalion (Vo 15366).Liner notes from Pete Seeger American Favorite Ballads, Vol 1; , Folkways SFW CD 40150 His version of "On Top of Old Smoky" used the alternative tune noted above."On Top Of Old Smok(e)y (1925) / Little Mohee (1926) / Great Shining Light (1938) / Pizza Song (1961) / On Top Of Spaghetti (1962) / Ich geh' noch zur Schule (1963)"—Extensive discussion at the site Joop's Musical Flowers.
In the 1940s through the mid-1960s, the United States experienced a folk music revival, of which Pete Seeger was a leading figure. His music, some of it drawn from scholarly sources like Sharp,See John Morrish (2007) The Folk Handbook: Working with Songs from the English Tradition. Hal Leonard Corporation, p. 180. was popular, and was disseminated widely in commercial recordings. Seeger modified a version of "On Top of Old Smoky" that he had learned in the Appalachians,Seeger was himself a fieldworker as well as performer; see Thomas A. Adler (2011) Bean Blossom: The Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Festivals University of Illinois Press, p. 72. In Seeger (1961:60) he says "I learned it from someone in the [Great] Smoky Mountains," though he does not say who or when. writing new words and banjo music. He said that he thought that "certain verses go back to Elizabethan times."Seeger's view is not implausible, since many American and English folk songs have common ancestry (see above), and the words for some English ballads are indeed preserved (as broadside ballads) from Elizabethan times. The sheet music for the song credited Seeger for "new words and music arrangement".
The Weavers, a folk-singing group that Seeger had co-founded, recorded a very popular version of the song, using Seeger's arrangement, on 21 February 1951. It was released by Decca Records as catalog number 27515, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard chart and No. 1 on the Cash Box chart, and selling over a million copies.
The enormous popularity of those recordings (and others following in their wake - see below) led to the curious situation of the song re-attaining folk status. It is one of the few songs that most Americans know from childhood, and many are unaware of the mid-century recordings that promulgated it so widely.
Other versions A number of artists released their versions following the success of the Weavers' recording. A version by Percy Faith & His Orchestra with Burl Ives on vocals reached No. 10 on the Billboard chart in 1951. It became one of Burl Ives' signature songs. Vaughn Monroe & His Orchestra also had success with the song, reaching No. 8 on the chart in June 1951.
Following its reintroduction to America by the Weavers, the song became a standard item of popular music, sung by Bing Crosby,See https://books.google.com/books?id=u3YUPNzAMX4C&dq=on+top+of+old+smokey+bing+crosby&pg=PA234 Perry Como, Gene Autry,. as well as (in a brief excerpt) Elvis Presley.