Kitchen Girl

The version everybody plays comes from one fiddler. Alan Jabbour collected Kitchen Girl in 1966 from Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, who was then in his eighties and who turned out to be carrying a whole repertoire of tunes nobody else had. Jabbour's band, the Hollow Rock String Band, recorded it in 1967, and from there it went everywhere. It is now so firmly part of the American old-time canon that European bands play it as a piece of Americana, which is a long journey for a tune that came off one man's porch sixty years ago.

Nobody knows what the title means, and the guesses should be kept apart from the facts. The fiddler Bill Hicks has pointed out that kitchen girl was a common term for an enslaved woman who worked in a house kitchen. The Traditional Tune Archive puts a different suggestion beside its entry: Christian Mayr's 1838 painting Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, which shows Black servants and slaves at a resort dancing in a kitchen, with a fiddler at the side of the room. Neither is documented as the source of the name.

What makes the tune sound the way it does is that it changes mode halfway through. The first strain has a c sharp in it and a g natural, which is A mixolydian, the major scale with a flattened seventh. The second strain drops the c to natural, which is A dorian, and the chord under it turns from A to A minor. Same tonic, same g natural, one note different, and the whole color of the tune moves. It is the clearest example on this shelf of how little it takes to change a key from bright to modal.

It is also unusually easy to hear coming. The first strain opens on a long a and a long g, four beats each, which is about as clear a signal as a fiddle tune ever gives, and the second strain opens with a stepwise climb that anyone can follow. The middle of each strain is the busy part.

On a mandolin the tune runs from the E at the second fret of the D course up to the b at the seventh fret of the E course, one reach for the little finger, and the hand stays where it is for everything else. The first strain lives on the top two courses and the second lives on the middle two, so the two halves feel completely different under the right hand even though the notes are neighbors. The bar to work on is the third of the second strain, A, B, c, d climbing to a held e, because that is where the c natural first arrives and the ear wants to play a c sharp there out of habit from the strain before.