“Bile Them Cabbage Down” is also known as “Boil Them Cabbage Down” and “Bake Them Hoecakes Brown”; “bile” is “boil.” It is an old-time breakdown and ditty that collectors have found from Oklahoma and Arkansas to southwestern Pennsylvania and northeast Alabama. Fiddlers play it in D, A or G, and it turns up often in beginners’ fiddle instruction books and in ditty books.
Where it came from is disputed. Ralph Rinzler traced the tune to an English country dance, “Smiling Polly,” in print in 1765. Alan Lomax called it “a negro reel tune which has become universally popular among white square dance musicians.” The song collections of White, Scarborough and Brown all took it down from Black informants. In American Mountain Songs, Richardson thought it derived from “Oh! Susanna.” The first published text came from the African American collector Thomas Talley, in Negro Folk Rhymes (1922), under the title “Cooking Dinner”: “Bile dem cabbage down, / Turn dat hoecake round.”
Early commercial records followed quickly. Uncle Dave Macon recorded “Bile Dem Cabbage Down” in New York on 11 July 1924, and Vocalion issued it on 14849 with “Down by the River.” Riley Puckett and Gid Tanner recorded it in 1924 too. On 18 December 1924, Fiddlin’ John Carson cut “Boil Dem Cabbage Down” at OKeh’s New York studio, and OKeh issued it in April 1925 on 40306, backed with “Steamboat Bill.” North Georgia bands kept coming back to it: the Skillet Lickers and Earl Johnson in 1928, and Clayton McMichen’s Georgia Wildcats in 1937. McMichen said it was his favourite contest tune, and he worked up a showpiece version for the major fiddle contests. Arthur Smith played it on his radio broadcasts.
Local accounts also place it in regional repertoires. In northeast Alabama it appears in reports of the DeKalb County fiddlers’ convention from 1926 to 1931, and in a list of tunes played around the turn of the century by the Etowah County fiddler George Cole. Vance Randolph included the title in a list of Ozark fiddle tunes published in 1954. Beisswenger and McCann note that Ozark fiddlers bow it with the Nashville shuffle and that contest players use it for crowd-pleasing displays of technique. On the other hand, Richard Nevins believed that musicians around Mount Airy, North Carolina, did not know it until the phonograph brought it.
