“Angeline the Baker” descends from “Angelina Baker,” a song Stephen Foster wrote for the Christy Minstrels and published in 1850, in which the singer mourns a woman sold away from the place where he knew her. Almost none of that survives in what is sung now. The melody was rebuilt by ear over several generations until only a fragment of Foster’s remained, and somewhere along the way “Baker” stopped being a surname and became a trade.
The words that travel with the tune today are a loose, comic set of floating verses. Angeline lives on the village green; the singer should have married her twenty years ago and did not; at forty-three she is fed sugar candy and still will not have him. Her father was a baker named Uncle Sam. She will not do hard work “because she is not stout,” but she bakes the biscuits every day and pours the coffee out. A stanza about a brand-new dress the colour of “stormy sky before the rain came down” sits next to one about sixteen horses with a blind leader, and the song closes on a dream of dying. Singers keep the verses they like and drop the rest.
Uncle Eck Dunford — a fiddler, singer and comedian from Carroll County, Virginia, who had married into the Stoneman family and recorded at the 1927 Bristol sessions — made the first commercial recording of the traditional version for Victor in 1928 (V-40060), backed with “Old Shoes and Leggins.”
