“Wildwood Flower” began as a sentimental parlor song, “I’ll Twine ’Mid the Ringlets.” Its words, credited to Maud Irving, tell of a young woman who has been jilted and vows not to show that the rejection hurt her. They appeared as a poem in the New York Weekly in April 1860, and the music is by Joseph Philbrick Webster (1819–1875), a New Hampshire-born composer who also wrote the tunes of “Lorena” and the hymn “In the Sweet By and By.” The Library of Congress catalogue dates the sheet music’s first edition to 1860, and Oliver Ditson was still reprinting it in Boston in 1888.
The song passed into Southern oral tradition and changed as it went. Maybelle Carter learned it from her mother and Sara Carter from a neighbour, and by then the maiden’s “ringlets” had become “mingles.” The Carter Family recorded it for Victor at the company’s studio in Camden, New Jersey, on 10 May 1928, which was Maybelle’s nineteenth birthday. It was their second day of sessions there. Sara sang, and Maybelle played guitar in the style later called the “Carter scratch”: the melody picked on the bass strings, with rhythm strummed on the higher strings. Victor issued it in January 1929, coupled with “Forsaken Love” (Victor V-40000). The trio recorded it again for ARC in New York on 8 May 1935. In 2006 the Library of Congress added the 1928 record to the National Recording Registry.
The Library of Congress essay calls Maybelle’s playing on the record “an example for pickers of every ilk.” She recorded it again and again: with her daughters for Columbia in Nashville in 1952, on a 1961 solo album for Briar, and in 1972 with Johnny Cash as “Pick the Wildwood Flower.” Other guitarists picked it up as well. Hank Thompson’s band cut it for Capitol in Hollywood on 13 December 1954 with Merle Travis on guitar, and the Library of Congress essay names recordings by Chet Atkins, Joe Maphis with Merle Travis, Clarence White, Roy Clark, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers, as well as jazz guitarists John Scofield and Bill Frisell. Woody Guthrie borrowed the melody for the verses of “The Sinking of the Reuben James.”
