At least two quite different pieces go by the name “Polly Put the Kettle On.” The older one is British. The melody known as “Jenny’s Baubie” was around by the 1770s. The collector John Glen found it printed in Dale’s Variations for the Pianoforte in 1794, noting that it had become “very popular with young ladies.” In 1803 Joseph Dale published it in London as a song, “Molly Put the Kettle On or Jenny’s Baubie.” Versions with “Polly” in place of “Molly” were printed in Dublin and in New York in the same years. The nursery-rhyme words in their familiar form first turn up in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841). As a dance tune it was played as a reel in England and Ireland. It was also pinned to barrel no. 1 of the barrel organ that Admiral Parry took on a polar expedition for the crew to dance to.
In the American South the title belongs to a group of old-time breakdowns, and the Fiddler’s Companion treats them as separate from the English reel and, in several cases, from one another. One, identified as a common east Tennessee tune, is also found in western North Carolina and north Georgia. Wiley Harper of Monroe, Georgia, played it at an Atlanta fiddlers’ contest in April 1913, and the 1940 collection Traditional Music in America prints it with a verse about slicing the bread and butter for tea. The North Carolina fiddler Osey Helton had it in his repertoire. Tommy Jarrell learned it from Charlie Lowe and recorded it on Joke on the Puppy (Mountain, 1976). In western North Carolina it also exists as a modal G tune, notated from Manco Sneed and from Marcus Martin, and as a further G Dorian tune with an irregular B part from Byard Ray. In Missouri, Bob Holt played yet another tune under the name, which he thought he had picked up from a radio broadcast by Lonnie Robertson. Banjo players also know Wade Ward’s version, played in double-D tuning (aDADE) with rolls and drop-thumbing.
