“Arkansas Traveler” is a reel known to fiddlers almost everywhere in the United States, and for most of its history it came with a comic dialogue. In the version told in Arkansas, which is said to date from 1840, a traveller who has lost his way stops at a squatter’s log cabin. The squatter gives evasive, joking answers to his questions while struggling through the first part of a tune on his fiddle. When the traveller offers to play the second part, the “turn,” the squatter makes him welcome. The Arkansas telling is credited to Colonel Sandford C. Faulkner (1803–1874), a Kentucky-born planter in Chicot County who had got lost in the backcountry himself and turned the episode into a performance. A similar tune and dialogue circulated outside the state at about the same time. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas concludes that it cannot be said which came first, and parts of the dialogue were already current in the 1820s and 1830s.
The music was printed in Cincinnati in 1847 as “The Arkansas Traveller and Rackinsac Waltz,” arranged by William Cumming, with no composer named. If the tune did not come from folk tradition, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas thinks the likeliest author is Jose Tosso, a Cincinnati classical violinist who was locally famous for playing it. Faulkner and the Buffalo entertainer Mose Case have also been credited. Case’s version of the dialogue, which ends with the traveller never daring to visit Arkansas again, was published in 1863. Oliver Ditson of Boston published a version attributed to Case that year, though a 1982 study by Cazden and colleagues reports an earlier printing in Buffalo, by Blodgett & Bradford, in 1858. The Arkansas painter Edward Payson Washburn painted the meeting of Traveler and Squatter by 1856, and Currier & Ives issued prints of it in 1870.
The tune spread widely. It was played at a wedding in a cabin on the Duwamish River near Seattle on Christmas Day, 1862, and it was one of the set pieces at an 1899 fiddle contest in Gallatin, Tennessee. Columbia was offering it on cylinder by 1901, and Len Spencer recorded the recitation with an unnamed fiddler for Zonophone in early 1902. The Kentucky fiddler Don Richardson recorded it for Columbia in April 1916. On 30 June 1922 in New York, the Texas fiddler Eck Robertson and the Confederate veteran Henry C. Gilliland recorded it as a fiddle duet for Victor (Victor 18956, backed with Robertson’s “Sallie Gooden”). That record was among the first fifty named to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. The Kessinger Brothers recorded it in Ashland, Kentucky, on 11 February 1928 for Brunswick.
Arkansas made “The Arkansas Traveler,” with lyrics written by a state committee in 1947, its official state song from 1949 to 1963, and it has been the state historic song since 1987.
