“Bully of the Town” started as a stage song. Charles E. Trevathan, a Southern sportswriter, horse judge and amateur musician, wrote it in 1895 for The Widow Jones, which opened at the Bijou Theatre in New York that September. May Irwin introduced it in the show, and the “Bully Song” became her signature number.
Trevathan gave several different accounts of how he came to write it. The blues researcher John Garst has argued that it grew out of an earlier blues ballad, “Ella Speed,” about the shooting of Ella Speed, a twenty-eight-year-old woman, in New Orleans in September 1894 by Louis “Bull” Martin, a man with a record of assaults who was caught after a manhunt. Garst makes three points. The Ella Speed song came a year or two before “Bully.” Both songs turn on a bully and a police hunt. And the two melodies are similar. He believes Trevathan heard “Ella Speed” from a Black musician friend named Cooley and substantially rewrote it. “Ella Speed” went on separately as a blues ballad, recorded by Lead Belly and later by Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins.
Southern fiddlers made the song a string-band tune. Clayton McMichen’s Home Town Band recorded it for OKeh in Atlanta on 7 July 1925. The Skillet Lickers followed on 17 April 1926, again in Atlanta, for Columbia: Gid Tanner and McMichen on fiddles, Riley Puckett on guitar and vocals, and Fate Norris on banjo. The West Virginia Tweedy Brothers recorded it for Gennett in 1928. A 1931 account of a fiddlers’ contest at LaFollette, Tennessee, names it among the tunes most often played. In the early 1940s Vance Randolph recorded it from Ozark fiddlers for the Library of Congress. It was also in the repertoire of the north Georgia fiddler Tommy Magness, and Etta Baker recorded it in 1956.
Bluegrass bands have played it as an instrumental. The Stanley Brothers recorded it at King’s studio in Cincinnati on 16 July 1964, with Ralph Stanley on banjo, Art Stamper on fiddle, Earl Taylor on mandolin and harmonica, and Carter Stanley and George Shuffler on guitars, though the track was not issued until 1983. Doug Dillard included it on The Banjo Album (1970), with John Hartford on fiddle, Bernie Leadon on guitar and Gene Clark on harmonica.
