Cripple Creek

Cripple Creek is one of the first tunes a clawhammer banjo player learns, so by the time it reaches a mandolin most of the room already knows it. It is old Appalachian music and it is short: two eight bar parts over three chords, with a shape plain enough to hear once and hum back. That is how it manages to be a beginner's tune and a session tune at the same time.

Like most old-time tunes of its age it has words. Going up Cripple Creek, going in a run, and the verses about the girl at the head of the creek are the ones most often sung, though no two singers keep the same set. It was common currency in the southern mountains before anybody thought to record it, and old-time bands have been putting it on record since the 1920s.

Which Cripple Creek the song means is not settled. Some players point to the creek in Wythe County, Virginia, others to the Colorado mining town that boomed in the 1890s. The Virginia creek fits the tune's home ground better, but geography is not evidence, and the question stays open.

The two parts sit in different places on a mandolin, and that is what makes it useful practice as well as an easy tune to enjoy. The A part is the high one. It reaches the A at the fifth fret on the E string and tumbles back down through F sharp, E and C sharp over an open A underneath. The B part drops and stays low, most of it on the A string, circling C sharp, B and A with that C sharp at the fourth fret. Both come home the same way, a climb from the E on the D string up through F sharp and A to B and onto the tonic. The fifth fret is the highest the hand ever goes, and it never has to shift to get there.