Buffalo Gals

The song reached print in 1844 as "Lubly Fan", credited to John Hodges, a blackface minstrel performer who worked under the name Cool White. Minstrel companies took almost everything they printed from somewhere else, so the melody was probably in circulation before that, but 1844 is the date the paper trail starts and it is long out of copyright.

The title moved with the show. A company playing New York sang New York Gals, a company in Boston sang Boston Gals, and Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins recorded Alabama Girls in the field as late as 1959. Buffalo won because of the town's canal district, the western end of the Erie Canal, where boat crews came off the water with their pay and the dance halls were waiting for them. Almost a century later the tune was still turning up in new clothes: it carried the words of "Dance with a Dolly" onto the pop charts in 1944, and it is the tune the town dances to in It's a Wonderful Life in 1946.

Two parts, both repeated, and everybody in the room already knows it. That is the reason to learn it early. The A part is the sung melody and the B part is the same shape with the long notes broken up, which is what a fiddler does to a song tune to make it a dance tune, so the two parts teach the trick side by side.

On a mandolin it stays between the open D course and the G at the third fret of the E course, so the hand never leaves first position. The one thing worth slowing down for is the three repeated notes in the second bar of each part, the "down the street, down the street" figure. Pick them down, up, down and let the third one ring for its full length. Played as three equal chops they sound like a mistake; played with the last one held, they sound like the song.