“Walk Along John to Kansas” is an old-time breakdown documented in Arizona and Texas. The Arizona fiddler Kenner C. Kartchner played it in A, with the fiddle cross-tuned (AEae or AEac#), and said the tune had come from the South. His setting appears in Frontier Fiddler, his memoir of pioneer life in northern Arizona, edited by Larry V. Shumway and published by the University of Arizona Press in 1990, and it was reprinted in Phillips’s Traditional American Fiddle Tunes (1994).
In 1941 John A. Lomax, recording for the Library of Congress in Hebbronville, Texas, captured “Walk Along, John to Kansas” from Mrs. F. E. Goodwyn on fiddle, with Frank Goodwyn on guitar.
The tune has relatives. The Fiddler’s Companion lists “Rabbit Where’s Your Mammy” and “Little Rabbit” as other names for it, and notes that Kartchner’s version resembles other tunes of that name, including the “Little Rabbit” to which fiddlers sing “Little rabbit, where’s your mammy?” It is filed separately from the Missouri and Ozark breakdown “Walk Along John.”
Later recordings include Rafe Stefanini’s on his County album Glory on the Big String, Tatiana Hargreaves’s on Started Out to Ramble (Patuxent, 2009) and John Reischman’s on Walk Along John (Corvus, 2013). On the 2011 collection Close Kin, a band with Jerry Correll on fiddle and Tim White on banjo performed it as a song, with Fat Albert Blackburn singing lead.
