“Old Joe Clark” is both a song and a fiddle breakdown, and no one has settled which came first. The folklorist Samuel Bayard thought it began as a song tune and later, or alongside, became a fiddle standard and a play-party tune. Alan Jabbour found no printed example of it and no mention of the title from the nineteenth century, and he judged it no older than the late 1800s or early 1900s. The earliest reference Andrew Kuntz found for The Fiddler’s Companion is a note in the Journal of American Folklore that it was “sung by East Tennessee whites, 1905.” Most versions are in A, major or Mixolydian. Some fiddlers, such as Edden Hammons of West Virginia, play it in the cross-tuning AEae.
Several places claim the original Joe Clark. Mike Seeger, who lived in Rockbridge County, Virginia, related a local story that a jilted suitor of Clark’s daughter made up the song out of jealousy in the late 1800s. Another story ties it to a Maryland murder after the Civil War, in which Joe Clark and Betsy Brown were said to have killed her husband, Herbert Brown, which would account for verses about Clark killing a man and choruses bidding goodbye to Betsy Brown. The claim with a historical marker behind it is from Clay County, Kentucky. The marker at Sextons Creek describes a mountain ballad of about 90 stanzas, sung by soldiers from eastern Kentucky in the First World War and later wars. It names Joe Clark, born in 1839, as a “shiftless and rough mountaineer” who ran a government-supervised still in the 1870s and was murdered in 1885. Kuntz adds that Clark served briefly in the Union Army and kept a store.
Its recorded history starts early. Fiddlin’ Cowan Powers and his family band from southwest Virginia recorded it for Victor in New York in August 1924, and The Fiddler’s Companion ranks their record as the third-best-selling country record of that year, with the Skillet Lickers’ 1926 recording fourth for its year. Alan Lomax recorded Louisiana fiddlers playing it for the Library of Congress in 1934, among them Horace Forman, who was born in the mid-nineteenth century. Vance Randolph recorded Ozark fiddlers playing it in the early 1940s. Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys cut it as an instrumental in Nashville on 4 December 1961 for the 1962 Decca album Bluegrass Ramble.
