Angeline the Baker

Angeline the Baker started life as a song. Stephen Foster published "Angelina Baker" in 1850, written for Christy's Minstrels, and its verses tell of a woman sent away from the plantation where the singer works. A great deal of American parlor music of that decade came off the minstrel stage. This tune is one of the pieces that outlived it.

The tune old-time players carry under that name is not quite Foster's. Somewhere between the minstrel stage and the fiddle, the title and scraps of the words attached themselves to a different melody, probably a cousin of the original, and the name drifted to Angeline the Baker along the way. That borrowed tune settled into the two parts written out here. Two chords, D and G, with the G coming around twice in each part, and that is a big reason it turns up so often as somebody's first tune at a jam.

It is a kind tune on a mandolin. All of it sits on the top two courses, and even the high A stays inside the fifth fret. The sheet leads with the low part, because that is where a jam starts it: a rise from A through B to D, with one long note, the B held over the G chord in the fourth bar, where the tune takes a breath. The high part answers with an A tumbling to F sharp and E, then F sharp to E and D. Both parts close on the same tag, and both land on A, not D, which is part of why it keeps rolling around. Play it relaxed.