“Down Yonder” was written, words and music, by L. Wolfe Gilbert, the Russian-born Tin Pan Alley songwriter who had written the lyric of “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” in 1912. The new song was published in 1921 and introduced that year at the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans. Gilbert brought back four characters from the earlier song, Daddy, Mammy, Ephraim and Sammy, and wrote a homesick song about going back South, with a chorus that recalls the steamboat race between the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee. Records by the Peerless Quartet, made on 19 May 1921, and by Billy Jones and Ernest Hare were both popular that year. The words have seldom been heard since, because the piece has mostly been played as an instrumental.
Georgia string bands soon made it a fiddle tune. The Scottdale String Band, from the mill village of Scottdale near Atlanta, recorded it for OKeh in 1926, and Clayton McMichen’s Melody Men followed on 6 November 1926 (Columbia 15130-D). Art Rosenbaum suggests that McMichen may have learned the tune from the Peerless Quartet record. Rosenbaum also collected a story about the title from the Georgia banjo player Uncle John Patterson, who did not know it had been a popular song first. At a fiddlers’ convention in Atlanta in the 1920s, Patterson said, he was playing with Gid Tanner, Fate Norris, Lowe Stokes and others when he broke a string on a tune nobody could name. He said he had to go “down yonder” for a new string, and the others took that as the title.
The best-selling string-band record of it came in 1934. Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers recorded it on 29 March, and it was issued backed with “Back Up and Push.” Tony Russell writes that Gid’s seventeen-year-old son, Gordon Tanner, played the uncredited fiddle lead. RCA kept the record in print until 1960, and it sold more than a million copies. Collectors found the tune among fiddlers too. Fiddle tunes of that name had been collected in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and Iuka, Mississippi, by 1940. In 1939 Herbert Halpert recorded John Hatcher, a fiddler in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, playing it for the Library of Congress. Printed fiddle settings are in G major or C major.
In 1951 the piece became a piano hit. The Nashville pianist Del Wood recorded it for the Tennessee label around April 1951. Issued that July on Tennessee 775, it reached the Billboard country and pop charts, sold more than a million copies, and led to her Grand Ole Opry appearances from 1952. Versions by Joe “Fingers” Carr, Champ Butler, Lawrence “Piano Roll” Cook, the Freddy Martin orchestra, the Frank Petty Trio and Ethel Smith also charted that year. On the Cash Box chart, which combined all versions, the song reached number one for the week of 15 December 1951. In 1960 an instrumental by Johnny and the Hurricanes (Big Top 45-3036) reached number 48 on the Billboard chart and number 8 in the UK.
