Little Maggie

Little Maggie is an Appalachian song that bluegrass took over whole from the old-time players. The Traditional Tune Archive places it in western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia, and says its verses belong to the same family as Darling Corey and Country Blues, though the melody is its own. G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter recorded it for Victor in 1928 as Little Maggie With a Dram Glass in Her Hand. Wade Mainer, Zeke Morris and Steve Ledford recorded it in 1937, and the Stanley Brothers in 1946, when their music was still closer to old-time than to bluegrass. In the 1960s it was folk revival repertoire, sung by Bob Dylan and the Kingston Trio.

The fiddler Tommy Jarrell remembered the song arriving in the Round Peak country around Mount Airy, North Carolina, in about 1915 or 1916, when the young people took to it at once. In the account Richard Nevins set down, when Jarrell's fourteen-year-old cousin Jullie lay dying after a fire in the kitchen stove, the one thing she asked for was to hear him play and sing Little Maggie. Nevins also found that it had been played in neighboring Grayson County, Virginia, a generation earlier.

What a jam plays is an eight bar break, twice: two bars of G, two of F, then G, D and two more of G. That is the sequence of the breaks on Ralph Stanley's and Flatt and Scruggs's records, and the sung verses stretch it by one bar of G. Some Stanley Brothers and Ricky Skaggs versions swap the second F bar for a D. The F chord is the sound of the song. It sits under the long F natural at the end of the first line, the flat seventh of G.

On a mandolin the two notes to own are the F natural at the third fret of the D course and the B flat at the first fret of the A course. The F is the long note under the F chord, so tremolo it and let it sit. The B flat is the blue third in the fall d, c, B flat over the D chord, and it comes back in the last bar. Everything else is the melody on its beats with short fills in the gaps after the long notes: a walk up F, A, c after the F, a lift into the second d, a turn after the G. Play the fills lightly and the song stays in front.