“Angelina Baker” is a Stephen Foster song. It was published in Baltimore in 1850 by F. D. Benteen as No. 4 of Foster’s Plantation Melodies, and its title page says it was sung by the Christy Minstrels. It is a blackface minstrel number in the language of that stage. Its singer mourns an enslaved woman, his sweetheart, who has been sold away from him. Foster’s biographer Ken Emerson has linked the song to that year’s arguments over free and slave states and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
In oral tradition the song became a fiddle and banjo breakdown, usually played in D, and fiddlers have called it “Angeline the Baker,” “Angeline,” “Rocky Road” in North Carolina and “Coon Dog” in Virginia. It kept some of its words, but the verses changed. Most sung versions tell of a girl who “won’t marry me” however much candy the singer brings her. The melody most fiddlers play has also moved away from Foster’s. Some singers still use a tune closer to his original, with verses about Angeline “the baker” and the day she was sold.
An early commercial recording was made in Bristol, Tennessee, on 30 October 1928. Uncle Eck Dunford sang and played guitar, with Hattie Stoneman on mandolin, Bolen Frost on banjo and Ernest Stoneman on harmonica. Victor issued it in 1929 as “Angeline, the Baker” on V-40060, backed with “Old Shoes and Leggins.”
The version most old-time players use today goes back mainly to two fiddlers. One was J. W. “Babe” Spangler (1882–1970), a fiddler from Patrick County, Virginia, whose playing appeared on the County album The Old Virginia Fiddlers. The other, learned earlier and separately by revival fiddlers such as Joel Shimberg, was the West Virginia fiddler Franklin George. George recorded it as “Angeline” around 1967 for his Kanawha album Traditional Music for Banjo, Fiddle and Bagpipes.
