Shady Grove

Shady Grove was a song before it was anything else. Collectors have taken down hundreds of floating verses for it across the southern mountains, the kind that belong to no particular song and turn up wherever they fit. The melody the jam plays is the one Jean Ritchie's family sang in Kentucky. They sang it a fourth lower, in E minor, which is still where singers call it. Fiddlers call it in A.

The mode is mountain minor again, the same unsettled ground Cluck Old Hen sits on. The instrumental form adds a high strain to what was originally just the verse. That high strain is only half new. Its second four bars fold straight back into the verse strain, so the two parts share an ending and you are really learning one and a half tunes.

It traveled a long way out of the mountains during the folk revival, which is why people who have never been near an old-time jam can sing along with it. At bluegrass jams it has a particular job. It is one of the very few minor flavored tunes everybody in the circle already knows, so it gets called when a night of major key reels needs somewhere else to go.

On a mandolin the verse strain hammers the tonic A on the open A course and dips below it to the G and E on the D string, at the fifth and second frets. The high strain circles the G at the third fret of the E string. The tune's one F sharp lives up here too, at the second fret, a dorian lift that brightens the minor for a couple of bars before the shared ending pulls it back down. Since the parts share their last four bars, the second one is four new bars and a memory of the first.