Arkansas Traveler

Arkansas Traveler traveled with a comedy routine. The skit, popular from the 1840s onward, has a lost traveler asking directions of a squatter who will not stop fiddling long enough to answer, trading wisecracks with him verse by verse, until the traveler finally takes the fiddle and plays the ending the squatter never learned. The tune and the dialogue went around together on stage, in print, and in one famous pair of paintings, so plenty of people know the story without realizing they know the tune.

Who wrote it is not settled. Sandford Faulkner, an Arkansas planter and storyteller, is the name most often attached to the skit and sometimes to the melody. Mose Case published an arrangement in the 1850s and gets credited too. Neither claim closes the case. The tune has the shape of something already circulating that somebody put a title on. Arkansas made it the official state historical song in 1987, which settles the paperwork if not the authorship.

The two strains carry the story, at least the way it usually gets told. The low part is the squatter's, the half he plays over and over, and the high part is the turn of the tune the traveler supplies. Call that folklore, not musicology. It is still a good way to remember which part goes where.

On a mandolin the split is a real one. The A part lives down on the G and D strings, most of it under the open D, and the two notes that give it its character are both on the G course: the B at the fourth fret and the A at the second, sitting below the melody's home note. The B part answers two octaves higher, starting on the A at the fifth fret of the E string and running eighth notes across the top of the instrument. Both parts come home the same way, the D-C sharp-D-A into B-D-A-G tag and then the F sharp-D-E-F sharp cadence, so once you have that tag you have the ending of both halves. The hand never leaves first position. It just spends the two parts at opposite ends of it.