| "In the Pines" "Black Girl" "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" |
|
| Written by | Traditional |
|---|---|
| Published | 1917 |
| Language | English |
| Original artist | Unidentified field musician (1925) |
| Recorded by | Dick Justice (1929) Peg Leg Howell (1929) |
| Performed by | Hole Nirvana Mark Lanegan |
"In the Pines", also known as "Black Girl" and "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", is a traditional American folk song which dates back to at least the 1870s, and is believed to be Southern Appalachian in origin. The identity of the song's author is unknown, but it has been recorded by many artists in numerous genres. Traditionally, it is most often associated with the American folk musician Lead Belly, who recorded several versions in the 1940s, as well as the American bluegrass musician Bill Monroe, who helped popularize the song (in a different variant, featuring lyrics about a train) among bluegrass and country audiences with his versions recorded in the 1940s and 1950s.
The song, performed by The Four Pennies, reached the UK top twenty in 1964. A live rendering by the American grunge band Nirvana, which reinterpreted Lead Belly's version and was recorded during their MTV Unplugged performance in 1993, helped introduce the song to a new generation.
Contents |
Like numerous other folk songs, "In the Pines" was passed on from one generation and locale to the next by word of mouth. The first printed version of the song, compiled by Cecil Sharp, appeared in 1917, and comprised just four lines and a melody. The lines are:
"Black girl, black girl, don't lie to me
Where did you stay last night?
I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines
And shivered when the cold wind blows"
In 1925, a version of the song was recorded onto phonograph cylinder by a folk collector. This was the first documentation of "The Longest Train" variant of the song, which includes a stanza about "The longest train I ever saw". This stanza probably began as a separate song that later merged into "In the Pines". Lyrics in some versions about "Joe Brown's coal mine" and "the Georgia line" may refer to Joseph E. Brown, a former Governor of Georgia, who famously leased convicts to operate coal mines in the 1870s. While early renditions which mention the head in the "driver's wheel" make clear that the decapitation was caused by the train, some later versions would omit the reference to the train and reattribute the cause. As music historian Norm Cohen pointed out in his 1981 book, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong, the song came to consist of three frequent elements: a chorus about "in the pines", a stanza about "the longest train" and a stanza about a decapitation, but not all elements are present in all versions.[1][2]
Starting in 1926, commercial recordings of the song were done by various folk and bluegrass bands. In a 1970 dissertation, Judith McCulloh found 160 permutations of the song.[3] As well as rearrangement of the three frequent elements, the person who goes into the pines, or who is decapitated, is described as a man, woman, adolescent, husband, wife, or parent, while the pines can be seen as representing sexuality, death, or loneliness. The train is described as killing a loved one, as taking one's beloved away, or as leaving an itinerant worker far from home.[1]
In variants in which the song describes a confrontation, the person being challenged is always a woman. The folk version by the Kossoy Sisters asks, "Little girl, little girl, where'd you stay last night? Not even your mother knows." The reply to the question, "Where did you get that dress/ And those shoes that are so fine?" from one version is, "From a man in the mines/ Who sleeps in the pines."[1] The theme of a woman being caught doing something she should not is thus also common to many variants. One variant, performed in the early twentieth century by the Ellison clan (Ora Ellison, deceased) in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, tells of a young Georgia girl who flees to the pines after being raped. Her rapist, a male soldier, is later beheaded by the train.
Some versions of the song also reference the Great Depression, with the "black girl" being a hobo on the move from the police, who witnesses the murder of her father while train-jumping. She hides from this by sleeping in the pines, in the cold.
Bill Monroe's 1941 and 1952 recordings of the song, under the title "In the Pines," were highly influential on later bluegrass and country versions. Recorded with his "Bluegrass Boys" and featuring fiddles and yodelling, they represent the "longest train" variant of the song, and omit any reference to a decapitation. However, as Eric Weisbard writes in his 1994 New York Times article, "A Simple Song that Lives Beyond its Time," "...the enigmatic train is almost as frightening, suggesting an eternal passage: 'I asked my captain for the time of day/ He said he throwed his watch away.'"[4]
Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly recorded over half-a-dozen versions between 1944 and 1948, most often under the title, "Black Girl" or "Black Gal". His first rendition, for Musicraft Records in New York City in February 1944, is arguably his most familiar. Listed as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," this version appears on a number of Lead Belly "best-of" compilations, such as Absolutely the Best (2000).
Another familiar version was recorded for Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, in New York City. Listed as "Black Girl" or "In The Pines," this version appears on compilations such as Where Did You Sleep Last Night - Lead Belly Legacy Vol. 1 (1996), and The Definitive Lead Belly (2008).
Lead Belly is often attributed with authorship of the song, as on the version released by Nirvana on their MTV Unplugged album in 1994. However, Ledbetter discovered and reinterpreted it much like other musicians did before and after him. According to the American folklorist Alan Lomax, Lead Belly learned the song from someone's interpretation of the 1917 version compiled by Cecil Sharp, and by the 1925 phonograph recording.[4]
"In the Pines," converted into the Cajun French language and sung under the titles "Pine Grove Blues" or "Ma Negresse," became one of the landmark songs of Cajun music. The song is most associated with Nathan Abshire, the Louisiana Cajun accordion player, for whom "Pine Grove Blues" was his biggest hit. His melody is a hard-driving blues, but the lyrics, when translated to English, are the familiar "Hey, black girl, where did you sleep last night?" He recorded it at least three times, from the 1940s onward. Since then, Abshire's version has been covered by a wide variety of Cajun and zydeco musicians, including the Pine Leaf Boys, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, Beau Jocque, Fernest Arceneaux, Cedric Watson, and Corey Ledet.
The Four Pennies recorded and released "Black Girl" in October 1964. Following their number one hit "Juliet" and number 14, "I Found Out The Hard Way", both self-penned, their version was much played but only reached No. 20 in the British charts,[5] though it also had some success in the U.S.A.[6]
Nirvana occasionally performed the song during the early 1990s. Singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain was introduced to the song by Mark Lanegan, and played guitar on a version on Lanegan's 1990 album, The Winding Sheet. Like Lanegan, Cobain usually screamed its final verse.
It is likely that Cobain referenced Lead Belly's 1944 Musicraft version for his interpretation of the song; this is the version Lanegan owned an original 78 rpm of,[4] and the one Cobain's version most closely resembles, in lyrics, form and title. In a 2009 MTV article, Kurt Loder remembers arguing with Cobain about the song's title, with Cobain insisting, "But the Leadbelly version is called 'Where Did You Sleep Last Night,'" and Loder preferring the "In the Pines" title used by Bill Monroe (as well as Lead Belly).[7]
Cobain earned critical and commercial acclaim for his acoustic performance of the song during Nirvana's MTV Unplugged appearance in 1993. This version was posthumously released on the band's MTV Unplugged in New York album the following year. A solo Cobain home demo, recorded in 1990, appears on the band's 2004 box set, With the Lights Out. It does not feature the final screamed verse of later versions.
Jerry Reed recorded a version on "Jerry Reed Explores Guitar Country" released in 1969.
|
||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||