The fiddle tune now called “Turkey in the Straw” reached print in 1834 as “Zip Coon,” a blackface minstrel song. The Library of Congress holds sheet music of it published that year in New York by Thos. Birch, and a lithographed cover of about the same date credits it to “G.W. Dixon, national vocalist” and shows a caricature of an extravagantly dressed African American man. According to Mark Wilson, G. W. Dixon and Bob Farrell popularised the song on the minstrel stage in the early 1830s. Its early printings, five of them by one count, credit different composers, and its authorship has never been settled.
The melody may be older than the song. Bronner, writing in 1987, judged it “undoubtedly in American folk tradition before the 19th century.” Samuel Bayard heard it as a composite of two Scottish tunes, with the first part from “The Rose Tree” and the second from “The (Bonny) Black Eagle.” Alan Jabbour agreed at least on “The Rose Tree,” while Wilson doubted the link because the two tunes feel so different in performance. Captain Francis O’Neill proposed the Irish “Kinnegad Slashers,” a resemblance most later writers have dismissed. Colonel T. Allston Brown, writing on early minstrelsy, said the tune came from a jig called “Natchez Under the Hill,” and that title shows up in George P. Knauff’s Virginia Reels in 1839.
The name it goes by today came from later songs. Fuld traced the title “Turkey in de Straw” to new lyrics copyrighted by Dan Bryant in 1861, set to what was labelled only an “old melody.” Other writers find the title in general use only from the 1880s. O’Neill later met Silas Leachman, a Chicago alderman who said he had written one of several songs of that name, and Leachman recorded “Turkey in de Straw” as a vocal with piano in 1901.
The early country fiddle records made it a breakdown. Henry Gilliland and Eck Robertson recorded it as a fiddle duet for Victor in New York on 30 June 1922, and Victor issued it in 1923 backed with Robertson’s “Ragtime Annie” (Victor 19149). Gid Tanner and Clayton McMichen of the Skillet Lickers cut it on twin fiddles for Columbia in Atlanta on 17 April 1926, with Riley Puckett on guitar and Fate Norris on banjo. Field recordings for the Library of Congress followed, including Vance Randolph’s sessions with Ozark fiddlers in the early 1940s and Benjamin Botkin’s 1944 recording of the Catskills fiddler Harry Robinson. In the 1930s the Opry fiddler Arthur Smith played an updated version that he called “Straw Breakdown.”
