“Big Ball in Brooklyn” is one of many titles for a floating-verse dance song whose earliest documented recording is Billy Golden’s “Roll on the Ground,” made in 1899 and issued on Berliner and Victor. The Ballad Index’s editors think it began as a popular minstrel-stage piece. It has no known author, and its verses are loosely strung together: parties and dancing, drink, a sweetheart in jail, and a laborer who works on the railroad and sleeps on the ground. Its chorus takes one of two forms, either a repeated “roll on the ground” or an announcement that a big ball is in town, with the name of the town changing from one performance to the next.
The “Big Ball” titles reached string-band records in the late 1920s. Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers recorded “Big Ball in Town” for Columbia in 1927, and Warren Caplinger’s Cumberland Mountain Entertainers cut it for Brunswick in 1928. The Georgia Yellow Hammers followed with “Big Ball in Memphis” for Victor in 1929, and the Delmore Brothers made “Big Ball in Texas” for Bluebird in 1938. Al Hopkins and his Buckle Busters had already recorded “Roll on the Ground” for Brunswick in 1927.
The Brooklyn version came into bluegrass by way of Bill Monroe, who recorded “Big Ball in Brooklyn” in Nashville on 26 April 1962 with Frank Buchanan on guitar, Tony Ellis on banjo, Benny Williams and Red Stanley on fiddles and Bessie Lee Mauldin on bass; Monroe sang lead, with Buchanan on the lead part of the chorus. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs played it at Carnegie Hall on 8 December 1962 in a concert later issued in full on At Carnegie Hall! The Complete Concert (Koch, 1998). Other titles for the same song kept turning up in bluegrass and country: Stringbean recorded “Big Ball in Nashville,” and Del McCoury and the Dixie Pals recorded “Big Ball in Boston” on High on a Mountain (Rounder, 1973).
