In the Pines

In the Pines is an Appalachian song that grew out of two older ones, In the Pines and The Longest Train, and nobody knows who made either. Wikipedia dates them to at least the 1870s and places them in the mountains where Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and Georgia meet. It has traveled under other names too: Black Girl, My Girl, and Where Did You Sleep Last Night.

It was on record early. Wayne Erbsen gives the dates: Dock Walsh recorded it for Columbia on April 17, 1926, Clayton McMichen's Georgia Wildcats made a version called Grave in the Pines in 1930, and Fiddlin' Arthur Smith recorded it in 1938. Bill Monroe recorded it with Clyde Moody in Atlanta in October 1941 and again with Jimmy Martin in Nashville in July 1952, and that is the bluegrass song. Lead Belly recorded his own blues version in the 1940s. According to Alan Lomax, he learned it from an interpretation of Cecil Sharp's 1917 collected version and from a 1925 record. Nirvana's 1993 Unplugged performance followed Lead Belly.

This page carries the traditional melody the way bluegrass and old-time singers share it now, in waltz time, and none of those records or arrangements. It is only eight bars. The line climbs to a long d, leans on a long c over the C chord, comes back to G, rises once more and settles through a long A over the D chord onto G. The verses and the chorus are sung to the same eight bars.

On a mandolin nearly every bar opens on a long note, so this is a tremolo song. Give the long G, d, c and A each an even tremolo, then pick the two short notes after it as a pair that swings, long then short, the way the jam sheets mark it. The run in the last bar starts on the F natural at the first fret of the E course, the blue note, and falls d, c, B, A back into the top.