“Katy Hill” is a G-major breakdown known to fiddlers across the South and the Midwest. Collectors have noted it down from players in Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, northeast Alabama, Missouri and Nebraska. It shares a family with “Sally Johnson.” The North Carolina fiddler Tommy Jarrell told an interviewer in 1982 that he thought “Katy Hill” came from “Piney Woods Gal,” and that “Sally Johnson” had in turn come from “Katy Hill.” The folklorist Mark Wilson hears it differently. He thinks the older forms of the two tunes had only a rough likeness in their high second strain and were once separate pieces. In his view they grew into near-twins when Grand Ole Opry fiddlers used both as showpieces at faster and faster tempos. A few fiddlers, among them Dwight Lamb of Iowa and Jim Herd of Missouri, still play it in four parts.
The tune was on the lists of the De Kalb County, Alabama, fiddlers’ conventions between 1926 and 1931, and it was in the repertoire of the West Virginia fiddler Edden Hammons. The Georgia-born fiddler Allen Sisson recorded it for Edison in New York on 26 February 1925, with John F. Burkhardt on piano. It came out on Edison 51690, backed with “Cumberland Gap.” In Atlanta on 3 October 1927, Bill Chitwood and His Georgia Mountaineers cut it for OKeh as “Kitty Hill” (OKeh 45162).
In north Georgia the tune was closely tied to Lowe Stokes (1898–1983). He learned it from the Alabama fiddler Joe Lee, born in Etowah County in 1883, a player he called the “best old time fiddler I ever heard.” On 14 April 1930 in Atlanta, Stokes and the guitarist Riley Puckett recorded a performance that Columbia issued as “Sally Johnson” (15620-D). A live recording made more than fifty years later, in 1982, has Stokes playing “Katy Hill” and telling how he learned it from Lee.
Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith of Tennessee helped spread the tune, and so did Bill Monroe. Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys recorded it in Atlanta on 7 October 1940, in rooms at the Kimball House, with Tommy Magness on fiddle, Clyde Moody on guitar and Cousin Wilbur Wesbrooks on bass. Bluebird issued it on B-8692, coupled with “Dog House Blues.” A story told by the West Virginia fiddler Woody Simmons in 1979 has Chubby Wise winning a place in Monroe’s band by playing “Katy Hill” at his audition. Monroe recorded the tune again for Decca at Bradley’s Barn on 13 January 1971, with Kenny Baker among the fiddlers.
