“Buffalo Gals” was published in Boston in 1844 as “Lubly Fan Will You Cum Out To Night?” by Keith’s Music Publishing House, credited to “Cool White,” the stage name of the blackface minstrel performer John Hodges. Folklorists have doubted that Hodges composed it. The Ethiopian Serenaders, another blackface troupe, published a similar song as “Philadelphia Gals” in 1845 and as “Buffalo Gals” in 1848, in neither case naming a composer, and the 1848 sheet music is the first printed version in the form now familiar. Minstrel singers swapped in the name of whatever town they were playing, so the song also circulated as “New York Gals,” “Boston Gals” and “Alabama Girls,” the last recorded by Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins in 1959.
The melody is older than the minstrel song. Fiddlers in parts of Virginia and West Virginia call the tune “Round Town Gals,” “Round Town Girls” or “Midnight Serenade,” and in 1987 Chris Goertzen and Alan Jabbour traced it to a collection of dance tunes published in 1839, G. P. Knauff’s Virginia Reels, where it appears as “Midnight Serenade.” Alan Jabbour recorded the Virginia fiddler Henry Reed playing “Round Town Gals” in 1966.
The song itself is a call to dance. A singer walking down the street meets a girl, and the chorus asks the Buffalo girls to come out that night and dance by the light of the moon. A second verse has him dancing with a girl whose stocking has a hole in it, her heel and toe keeping time. Later words were set to the same tune: “Dance with a Dolly (with a Hole in Her Stocking)” was recorded by several artists in 1944, and Bobby Darin’s “Plain Jane” (1959) has a chorus based on it.
Pete Seeger recorded “Buffalo Gals” with banjo for American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 1 (Folkways FA 2320), issued in December 1957; it was the first of five volumes of that title released through 1962.
