“Big Ball in Brooklyn” is one title among many for a floating old-time song that has been traced back to Billy Golden’s 1896 recording “Roll on the Ground,” a minstrel-stage piece. By the 1920s it had gathered a new set of party-and-railroad verses and a chorus announcing a “big ball” — a dance — in some city, the city name swapped freely from one performance to the next.
Early string bands recorded it as “Big Ball in Town” and “Big Ball’s in Town,” and by the 1950s most bluegrass groups had taken it up, usually fixing on “Big Ball in Brooklyn.” Its fast tempo and interchangeable verses made it a reliable up-tempo crowd-pleaser.
Flatt and Scruggs performed it at their celebrated 1962 Carnegie Hall concert, where they playfully retitled a “Big Ball in Boston” verse for the New York crowd. That recording, later issued in full, catches the song doing exactly what it was built to do: send an audience home grinning.
