“Bile Them Cabbage Down” is a fiddle tune with a chorus attached and a long tail of floating verses, most of them comic and most of them about animals. “Bile” is boil; a hoecake is a cornmeal cake cooked on a griddle. The chorus cheerfully admits its own limits — boil the cabbage down, turn the hoecakes round, “the only song that I can sing is bile them cabbage down” — and the verses then wander wherever the singer wants them to.
The set sung here opens on the mountain, where the singer goes to blow his horn and thinks he hears his true love say “yonder comes my beau.” After that: a girl taken to the blacksmith’s shop to have her mouth made smaller, who turns around twice and swallows the shop and all; a possum in a persimmon tree and a raccoon on the ground arguing over who shakes the persimmons down; a stolen coon dog the singer would like back; a blind possum that jumps a fence, whips his dog and bristles up at him; and finally Simon Slick, a grey mule who rolls his eyes, backs his ears and kicks with such conviction that he gets a hind foot down his own throat and kicks himself to death.
Three separate recordings of it appeared in 1924. Uncle Dave Macon cut his in New York on 11 July, singing and playing banjo, issued that September on Vocalion A 14849; the Georgia musicians Fiddlin’ John Carson and Riley Puckett each recorded the tune the same year.
