“Shady Grove, my little love, Shady Grove, my darling.” Those lines were written down in Kentucky in 1905 and printed in 1915. Singers have been adding verses ever since. Shady Grove runs on two chords and sits in A Dorian, a mode that sounds neither major nor minor. It works as a song, a banjo piece, and a fiddle breakdown. For a lot of pickers it is the first modal tune they learn.
Where it came from
The earliest printing appears in the Journal of American Folk-Lore, volume 28, in 1915. E.C. Perrow set two texts under the title Shady Grove in his article “Songs and Rhymes from the South.” Text A came from East Tennessee, written from memory in 1905. Text B came from Kentucky, from a manuscript dated 1905. Text B carries the “fly around, my blue-eyed girl” verse that turns up in dozens of mountain songs.
Perrow added a footnote worth reading. He wrote that Shady Grove was sung to the same tune as Old Joe Clark, then admitted he could not say which song the tune belonged to. He blamed the small number of tunes in circulation for the mixing of ballads, and said he was not sure he had put every stanza in the right song. Perrow printed Old Joe Clark and Cripple Creek in the same article. Mike Yates writes that the song began in eastern Kentucky around the start of the twentieth century, and names the 1915 printing as the earliest set he knows.
Cecil Sharp gets named in this story, so it is worth checking what he collected. Shady Grove does not appear in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, the 1917 book gathered by Olive Dame Campbell and Sharp. That book does hold seven versions of “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard,” the English ballad catalogued as Child 81 and known in America as Matty Groves. Sharp took one from Mrs. Becky Griffin at Big Laurel, North Carolina, on August 17, 1916, and another from Mrs. Jane Gentry at Hot Springs, North Carolina, on August 24, 1916.
The claim that Shady Grove descends from Matty Groves needs care. What the record shows is a shared tune, not a proven descent. Appalachian singers including Dillard Chandler and Sheila Kay Adams sang the ballad to the Shady Grove melody, and Fairport Convention used that tune for “Matty Groves” on Liege and Lief in 1969. Wikipedia marks its own British origin claim as unsourced. A better documented link runs through the fiddle. Alan Jabbour, who recorded Henry Reed for the Library of Congress, notes that the first strain of Reed’s Shady Grove relates to the British march “Boyne Water” and to variants of “Barbara Allen,” while the second strain matches the song melody.
How it works
The Traditional Tune Archive lists Shady Grove in A Dorian with one sharp. Dorian has a flatted third, which makes it sound minor. It carries a raised sixth, which lifts it out of a plain natural minor. In A Dorian that raised sixth is F sharp. One note is the whole reason the tune sits between major and minor.
Two chords carry the song. A minor is the 1 minor and G is the flat 7. Most settings run 1 minor, flat 7, 1 minor, 1 minor, then repeat with a flat 7 pushing back home. Nothing else is needed. E minor is the common alternate key for lower voices.
The Country Dance and Song Society notes that the song is most played in a modal tuning. That is one reason Shady Grove shows up early in banjo lessons. A modal tuning gives a drone under the melody with no left hand work. Clarence Ashley played it in rapping style, and Sidna Myers of southwestern Virginia recorded a clawhammer version for County Records.
The fiddle version has two strains, a low one and a high one. Henry Reed played the high strain first, which Jabbour describes as an old Upper South habit that reverses the British order. Reed’s high strain starts off the tonic, which is rare for the song form.
Verses move from song to song. Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr count as many as three hundred stanzas by the early twenty-first century. Jean Ritchie called it one of the mountain play-party tunes, the kind sung at Kentucky family gatherings with dancing. Players who like this sound tend to reach for Little Maggie next, though that one sits in A Mixolydian rather than Dorian.
Recordings worth hearing
Clarence Ashley recorded Shady Grove for Folkways during sessions held between 1960 and 1962, with Doc Watson in the group. Ashley sings and plays rapping style banjo, and Jack Burchett plays a second banjo. The track sits on The Original Folkways Recordings of Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley 1960-1962.
Doc Watson sings his own version on The Watson Family, with Merle Watson on banjo. Smithsonian Folkways carries it as SFW 40012, which also holds the older Folkways number FA 2366. Doc kept the song for decades. The State Archives of Florida holds a tape of him playing it at the Florida Folk Festival in White Springs on May 25, 1996, with Jack Lawrence.
Bill Monroe cut a bluegrass Shady Grove on November 10, 1961 at the Owen Bradley Studio in Nashville. The band was Benny Williams on fiddle, Jimmy Maynard on guitar, Curtis McPeake on banjo, and Bessie Lee Mauldin on bass. Decca issued it on DL7-4266.
Jerry Garcia and David Grisman named a whole album after the song. Acoustic Disc released Shady Grove (ACD-21) on October 5, 1996, more than a year after Garcia died. The tracks came from Dawg Studios sessions recorded between August 1990 and June 1993. The title cut opens the record.
For the older sound, try Jean Ritchie on Saturday Night and Sunday Too (Riverside, 1956) and Henry Reed’s fiddle recording made at his home in Glen Lyn, Virginia, on June 18, 1966.
Sources
Facts on this page come from E.C. Perrow’s “Songs and Rhymes from the South” in the Journal of American Folk-Lore, volume 28, the 1917 Campbell and Sharp collection English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, the Traditional Tune Archive annotations for Shady Grove (1) and Shady Grove (3), the Library of Congress entry for Henry Reed’s Shady Grove, and Mike Yates’s note on the Mainly Norfolk Shady Grove page.
Recording details come from Smithsonian Folkways, the Discography of American Historical Recordings entry for Bill Monroe’s 1961 session, Discogs, jerrygarcia.com, and the State Archives of Florida. The modal tuning note comes from the Country Dance and Song Society song of the month, and the Matty Groves tune connection is laid out on the Mainly Norfolk page for Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard and the Wikipedia article on Shady Grove, which flags its own British origin claim as unsourced.