Few bluegrass songs answer to three names. Pickers call it In the Pines. Rock fans know it as Where Did You Sleep Last Night. Early collectors filed it as Black Girl. The verses move around, the mood shifts, and the story changes from singer to singer. That is not a flaw. This is one of the oldest and least settled songs in the songbook, and nobody knows who wrote it.
Where it came from
The song goes back to at least the 1870s in the southern Appalachians, across a region covering east Tennessee, Kentucky, western North Carolina, and north Georgia. It was never a single song. Judith McCulloh built her 1970 Indiana University dissertation around it, and she counted 160 variants and arrangements. Three chunks of text keep showing up. One is the chorus about the pines where the sun never shines. One is a verse about the longest train the singer ever saw. One is a grim verse about a body found near the tracks with the head missing. Few versions carry all three. The longest train material began as its own song and merged into the pines material later.
Cecil Sharp put an early text in print. He took it down from Lizzie Abner at Oneida, Kentucky on August 18, 1917, and he wrote the title as Black Girl. Folklorists index the family as Roud 3421. Sharp’s printed page matters more than it looks, because Alan Lomax reported that Lead Belly learned the song from that collection by way of a revival singer rather than from oral tradition.
Dock Walsh cut the first commercial record. Walsh was a banjo player from North Carolina. He recorded In the Pines in Atlanta on April 17, 1926, and Columbia issued it as 15094-D with “Going Back to Jericho” on the other side. Sources disagree about what came first. Some point to earlier field documentation, and some name a 1927 Grayson and Whitter disc. The Walsh side is the one most writers treat as the start of the song’s commercial life.
How it works
Jams call this one in E. The Idaho Bluegrass Association jam sheet and the Pickers Guide entry both put it there, and Monroe’s recording reads as E at about 115 beats per minute. Some players and teachers use D instead, which suits lower voices and keeps the banjo fingering plain. Three chords cover it: the 1, the 4, and the 5. The common shape is 1, 4, 1, 5, 1, roughly one chord per line, with the 1 chord under most of the melody.
The tune sits between major and minor. Flatting the third of the scale darkens the sound, and that one change explains why two bands can play the same three chords and sound nothing alike. Nothing here is hard for the hands. Everything here is hard for the voice. This is a singer’s song, and it lives on how long a phrase gets held and how far the pitch bends. Bands treat it the way they treat Little Maggie, as a slow open frame that a strong lead singer fills. A jam takes it at a walking pace, holds the last word of each line, and lets the fiddle answer.
One note on rights. The old song is public domain, and 1870s roots put it far outside any live term. Specific arrangements are a separate matter. Nirvana’s album credits “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” to Huddie Ledbetter, published by Folkways Music Publishers. Decca’s 1952 Monroe release and its later MCA reissue credit In the Pines to Clayton McMichen and Jimmie Davis. The traditional song and the Lead Belly arrangement are not the same thing under the law. Anyone recording or publishing a version needs to know which arrangement they copied. That is also why no lyrics, tab, or notation appear on this page.
Recordings worth hearing
Bill Monroe made this a bluegrass song twice. The first version came from an Atlanta session on October 2, 1941, released by Bluebird as B-8861 with “Blue Yodel No. 7.” The second came from Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel in Nashville on July 18, 1952, released by Decca as 28416 with “Footprints in the Snow.” The 1952 band had Jimmy Martin on guitar, Sonny Osborne on banjo, Ernie Newton on bass, and Charlie Cline on fiddle. Osborne was 14 at that session. Monroe kept the train and the pines, and he left the decapitation verse out. That choice moved the song away from murder ballad and toward heartbreak, and every bluegrass version since runs through it, the same way Blue Moon of Kentucky runs through his hands.
Lead Belly took the other road. He recorded the song several times in the 1940s under the titles Black Girl and Where Did You Sleep Last Night, and his 1944 Musicraft side is the one that stuck. The Moses Asch sessions from 1941 to 1947 sit on the Smithsonian Folkways set Where Did You Sleep Last Night: Lead Belly Legacy Vol. 1. His reading is sparse and accusing, built on twelve-string guitar instead of a band.
Nirvana closed their MTV Unplugged taping with it at Sony Music Studios in New York on November 18, 1993. The album came out November 1, 1994, and it put the song in front of a generation that had never heard of Dock Walsh.
Sources
Facts on this page come from the Wikipedia article on In the Pines, the Wikipedia entry for Judith McCulloh, the Mainly Norfolk page for In the Pines, the SecondHandSongs work page, the Discogs listing for Dock Walsh’s Columbia 15094-D, the Native Ground article, and Slate’s history of the song.
Recording and credit details come from the Discogs listing for Bluebird B-8861, the Bill Monroe discography on Wikipedia, the Bluegrass Today column covering the July 1952 session, the Discogs listing for Decca 28416, the Smithsonian Folkways album page for Lead Belly Legacy Vol. 1, the Discogs credits for MTV Unplugged in New York, and the Wikipedia article on that album. Key and tempo come from the Idaho Bluegrass Association jam page and the Pickers Guide entry.