Wildwood Flower

The melody is older than the record that made it famous, and for once the paper trail is clean. It was published in 1860 as "I'll Twine 'Mid the Ringlets", music by Joseph Philbrick Webster, words credited to Maud Irving, and the manuscript survives at the University of Wisconsin. So this page can carry the tune without apology. The melody is demonstrably in the public domain, which is more than can be said for a lot of what gets called traditional.

What fixed it in every picker's hands was the Carter Family's 1928 recording. Maybelle Carter played the melody and the rhythm at the same time on one guitar, thumb on the bass notes and fingers brushing the chord around them, and that approach, the Carter scratch, became the founding lick of country guitar. The words had already drifted by 1928 and have gone on drifting since, which is why no two singers you meet will give you quite the same verse.

The page carries the song melody, the one the jam sings and picks, and not Maybelle's guitar arrangement. They are two different things, and you should know which one you are learning. The arrangement is a guitar player's problem. The melody belongs to everybody.

On a mandolin it is one eight bar strain in the shape a verse singer knows: three matching phrases and one contrasting lift in the middle. The two note pickup that walks into the phrase, E and F stepping up to G, is the figure everyone recognizes. All three notes sit on the D course, and most of the tune is getting that pickup to sound like a lead-in instead of three separate notes. The middle phrase climbs to the open E course and settles back down through the F chord. The range runs from the C at the fifth fret of the G course up to that E, an octave and a third, and the tune touches all four courses on the way without the hand ever going past the fifth fret. It is as good a first flatpicking song for mandolin as it is for guitar.