“Black Eyed Susie” is a traditional breakdown, one of the most widely played fiddle tunes in the old-time and bluegrass repertoire. Its melody is old: it has been traced to British Isles material of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before it crossed the Atlantic and settled into Southern fiddling.
In America it became a staple of the fiddle-contest circuit — turning up in accounts of competitions in Kentucky and Alabama in the 1920s — and it exists in both instrumental and sung forms, the verses a string of light, nonsense-edged courting lines about a girl named Susie. It should not be confused with the older English parlor ballad “Black-Eyed Susan,” a separate song. Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett were among the first to record it, in the 1920s.
The bluegrass group Baucom, Bibey, Graham and Haley recorded “Black Eyed Susie” on their 1998 self-titled album, one more entry in the long recorded life of a tune that has never gone out of circulation.
