Thousands of guitar players learned this song before they learned anything else. It is the tune that teaches the right hand to carry melody and rhythm at the same time. The words reached the 1928 Carter Family session worn down by sixty-eight years of singing, and some of them stopped making sense along the way. One line, about a pale aronatus with eyes of bright blue, sat in the 1860 sheet music and has never been matched to a real plant.
Where it came from
The song began in print as “I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets.” Words carry a credit to Maud Irving. Music carries a credit to Joseph Philbrick Webster. The 1860 date holds up across separate sources. Researcher Eric M. Bram traced a Library of Congress copyright registration for the title in 1860, published by a Chicago firm whose stock burned in the 1871 fire, which is part of why original copies are scarce.
Maud Irving may not have been a woman at all. Bram found poems signed Maud Irving through the 1860s, and later reprints that read “J. William Van Namee (Maud Irving).” Van Namee was a spiritualist poet who wrote under several names. Bram stops short of calling the case closed, and so does this page. A second Library of Congress essay, by Jay Orr and Ryan Dooley, tells it a little differently: the poem ran in the New York Weekly in April 1860, and Webster set it to music in the 1870s. The two accounts do not line up on when the melody arrived.
Between 1860 and 1928 the song passed mouth to mouth. A.P. Carter gathered pieces of it, and the Orr and Dooley essay traces the family’s version through Maybelle’s mother and a neighbor of Sara’s. Sound replaced sense. The line about twining ringlets in raven black hair became a line about twining with mingles and waving black hair. The pale aronatus turned into “the pale and the leader,” which means nothing at all. The odd part is that aronatus was already strange in 1860. No one has tied it to a flower.
The Carter Family recorded it on May 10, 1928, at Victor’s Camden, New Jersey studio, on Maybelle’s nineteenth birthday. The Discography of American Historical Recordings lists matrix BVE-45029, guitar and autoharp, Sara Carter on the vocal, and issues on Victor V-40000, Bluebird B-5356, Montgomery Ward M-4432, and Sunrise S-3437. Victor’s ledgers credit A.P. Carter as songwriter. Cary O’Dell puts sales near 100,000 copies, a large number for 1929. The Library of Congress added the recording to the National Recording Registry in 2006.
How it works
Guitar players learn this one in C. The whole tune runs on three chords: C, F, and G7, or the 1, the 4, and the 5. Cathy Fink’s Maybelle Carter course teaches it in exactly those standard shapes, which is the point. The left hand barely moves.
The form has a wrinkle worth knowing before a jam. The Idaho Bluegrass Association notes that the first, second, and fourth lines run five measures instead of the usual four. That extra measure is dead space in the melody and open room for a fill. Cutting it back to four measures is a common mistake. The same page notes that banjo and dobro players tend to call the tune in G at jams, so guitar players who only know it in C get caught out.
The reason this song became the teaching piece is the melody itself. It lives low, on the bass strings, inside the chord shapes the left hand is already holding. That is the exact condition the Carter scratch needs. Mike Seeger described Maybelle’s method as playing melody on the three bass strings with a downward thumb, then brushing up across the treble strings with the first finger. One player sounds like two. Maybelle used a thumbpick with a fingerpick turned backward, though her granddaughter Carlene Carter writes that Maybelle taught her the song with a flatpick.
That flatpick detail matters for where the song leads. Doc Watson learned Carter style as a boy and built his flatpicking out of it. A beginner who gets the thumb and brush working on this tune has the foundation for crosspicking and for faster fiddle tunes like Black Mountain Rag. The gear helped too. Maybelle bought a 1928 Gibson L-5 for $275 after the Bristol sessions, and its arched top gave the bass strings the punch her thumb needed.
Recordings worth hearing
Start with the 1928 Victor side. Sara sings it plain, and Maybelle’s guitar is the whole arrangement. Then hear what the family did with it later. Maybelle sang lead on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, released in November 1972 on United Artists, with Earl Scruggs on guitar. She played autoharp on that take, not the L-5, which says something about how she thought of the song by then. The tune sits beside Keep on the Sunny Side and Will the Circle Be Unbroken as core Carter Family repertoire.
The song kept moving outside the family. O’Dell’s essay names Joan Baez and Emmylou Harris among the many who cut it. Orr and Dooley point to Gene Watson’s 1979 “Pick the Wildwood Flower,” which reached the country top five and borrowed the title outright. For more standards built the same way, see the songbook.
Sources
Facts on this page come from the UCSB Discography of American Historical Recordings matrix entry, the Library of Congress National Recording Registry essays by Cary O’Dell, by Jay Orr and Ryan Dooley, and by Carlene Carter, and Britannica’s Carter Family entry.
Origin and lyric details draw on the Mudcat Cafe text of “I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets”, Eric M. Bram’s research at The Mystery of Maud Irving, and the Wikipedia article. Guitar technique and arrangement details come from Cathy Fink’s Carter scratch lesson at Peghead Nation, the Wikipedia entry on Carter Family picking, the Birthplace of Country Music piece on Maybelle Carter’s guitar, and the Idaho Bluegrass Association lesson notes.