On Top of Old Smoky
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.
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.
[3] 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.
[6] She 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.
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.
[12][13] 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).
[14] This tune was collected by the American fieldworkers Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway in Pine Mountain, Kentucky[15] from a singer named Mary Ann Bagley,[16] and published by them in 1916, hence a year before the Sharp/Karpeles version mentioned above.
Possibilities include Kuwohi, named "Smoky Dome" by local Scotch-Irish inhabitants, but exactly which mountain it is may be lost to antiquity.
[28] Following its reintroduction to America by the Weavers, the song became a standard item of popular music, sung by Bing Crosby,[29] Perry Como,[30] Gene Autry,[31] as well as (in a brief excerpt) Elvis Presley.
[33][34] This was during a time of collaboration with showbiz impresario and songwriter Povel Ramel[35] who in a revue paraphrased it as "Högt uppe på berget, jag har till en vän, förlorat en femma, jag lär nog aldrig se den utigen" (High up on the mountain, I have to a friend, lost a 5 kronor bill, I doubt I'll see it again).
[citation needed] Dave Van Ronk included the song on his album The Mayor of McDougal Street: Rarities 1957–1969.
In 1978, "On Top of Old Smokey" was released by Swedish pop group ABBA (with lead vocals by Frida) as part of a medley that also included "Pick a Bale of Cotton" and "Midnight Special".
Bruce Springsteen performed the song in Portland, Oregon a few months after the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens as a tribute during The River Tour.
Alternative country band The Gourds gangstered the lyrics to "On Top of Old Smoky" in the song "I'm troubled" on their 1998 release Gogitchyershinebox.
This version too seems to have entered modern folklore, and it widely is known to children; one source writes of the original "On Top of Old Smoky" "if you can listen to it and not think about spaghetti, sneezing and meatballs, more power to you.
