Old Joe Clark

Old Joe Clark is one of those Appalachian tunes that arrives with words attached. It is a song at least as much as a fiddle tune: a chorus about bidding Old Joe farewell, and behind it a long string of comic verses that players add to and swap around. The house fifteen stories high with every story full of chicken pie is one of the better known ones. Nobody sings quite the same set twice, and nobody is expected to.

The story usually told is that Joe Clark was a real man, a Kentucky mountaineer killed in the 1880s, and that the verses began as neighborly mockery. The details shift with the teller and the record behind them is thin, so hold the story loosely. How far the tune traveled is not in doubt. It was sung and played all over the southern mountains well before the recording era, and it sits in old-time and bluegrass jams today as reliably as anything in the repertoire.

On a mandolin the tune is largely a study in one note. A mixolydian is A major with a flattened seventh, so the G is natural, not sharp, and that single note keeps this from sounding like an ordinary tune in A. You meet it in the opening bar, inside the E to F sharp to G to F sharp figure that starts the first part, with the G natural sitting at the third fret on the E string. It comes back in the second part as the note a whole bar leans on, over a G chord. That second part is the low strain, the one the fare ye well chorus goes with, and it hammers away at the tonic A. The first part is where the tune lifts.

This setting is written the way a bluegrass mandolin player fills the tune rather than the way it is sung. Every note of the song is in it, but the fall through D to C sharp turns into a run, and the E chord bar is a D sliding up to E, the lick every picker plays there. Each part's first ending sits on the open A and open E, two strings and no frets. The low strain walks A D A B up to C sharp and D, then rocks between the open E and the open A where a fiddler would double the E. Both parts sign off the same way, C sharp B A C sharp then B A G B into the A, and the second time through each part a G natural tag closes it. It all sits in first position, with one reach to the A at the fifth fret of the E string.