“Grandfather’s Clock” (popularly “My Grandfather’s Clock”) was written in 1876 by Henry Clay Work, the author of “Marching Through Georgia.” The first sheet-music edition in the Library of Congress was published in New York by C. M. Cady in 1876. Work is said to have found the subject on a trip to England, in a longcase clock at the George Hotel in Piercebridge, County Durham. The clock was said to have belonged to two brothers named Jenkins: after one died it began to lose time, and when the other died it stopped for good.
In the song, a grandson tells of a clock bought on the morning his grandfather was born. It stood ninety years on the floor, needing only to be wound at the end of each week, and it seemed to share the old man’s griefs and joys: it struck twenty-four when he brought home his bride, rang an alarm in the night as he was dying, and stopped short, never to go again, when he died. Work published a sequel two years later, in which the clock has been sold off for scrap. It never matched the popularity of the original.
The Oxford English Dictionary names the song as the origin of the term “grandfather clock” for a longcase clock. The earliest known recording is from 1905, by Harry Macdonough and the Haydn Quartet. The song has been a standard of British brass bands and colliery bands, and the American music historians John T. Howard and George Kent Bellows claimed in 1967 that hardly any school songbook in the United States leaves it out. Doc Watson and his family played it at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, and the performance was issued on the Vanguard CD Treasures Untold in 1991.
