“Home! Sweet Home!” began on the London stage. In 1823 the American actor and playwright John Howard Payne sold a group of plays to Charles Kemble, manager of Covent Garden. He turned one of them into the operetta Clari, or the Maid of Milan by adding song lyrics, among them “Home, Sweet Home,” a reworking of a poem he had written as a student at Union College. The music was by Henry Rowley Bishop, then music director at Covent Garden. Bishop had earlier published a more elaborate form of the melody as “A Sicilian Air,” but later admitted that he had written it himself. Writing later in The Choir, Anne G. Gilchrist suspected that his idea of Sicilian music came from the hymn tune “Sicilian Mariners.” The song reached America the same year, with a performance in Philadelphia on 29 October 1823. Bishop relaunched it as a parlour ballad in 1852, and it stayed popular in the United States through the Civil War and after.
Dance musicians took it over early. The Fiddler’s Companion notes that the melody was soon made into a waltz, as well as serving as a song and hymn tune. It appears on the dance card for a quadrille at City Hall in Lima, Ohio, in January 1870. Because of its title it often closed a dance: the Arizona fiddler Kenner Kartchner remembered it as the closing number at dances from about 1900 on. In Québec, Joseph Allard recast it as a reel, recording it in 1928 as “Quadrille de chez-nous” and in 1945 as “Reel de Tadoussac.” In Louisiana the Breaux Frères recorded it as a waltz for Vocalion in 1933, and Harry Smith later included that record on his Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways, 1952). In the southern mountains, Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters of Galax, Virginia, cut a string-band instrumental version for Gennett in Richmond, Indiana, around 6 May 1927, with Ben Jarrell on fiddle.
In bluegrass the tune became a banjo showpiece. Two versions came out on 78 in the spring of 1955. Hack Johnson and His Tennesseans, with Allen Shelton on banjo, released it on Colonial in March. Don Reno recorded it alone on 25 April at WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina, playing every instrument himself, and King issued it in May backed with “Green Mountain Hop.” Earl Scruggs recorded his own arrangement with Flatt and Scruggs on 11 August 1960 at the Bradley studio in Nashville, with Lester Flatt on guitar, Curly Seckler on mandolin, Buck Graves on dobro and Jake Tullock on bass. It appeared the following February on Foggy Mountain Banjo (Columbia, 1961).
