The Cumberland Gap is the notch in the Cumberland Mountains where Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee meet — the pass that carried settlers west after Daniel Boone cut the Wilderness Road through it in 1775. The song is less a history of the place than a set of verses that circle it, and the words name the landmarks directly. “The first white man in Cumberland Gap was Doctor Walker, an English chap” is roughly right: Thomas Walker, a Virginia physician and surveyor, passed through and named it in 1750, a generation before Boone. Another verse puts Boone himself on Pinnacle Rock with his old flintlock, in period language.
Around those sit domestic and comic stanzas rather than narrative ones. The singer, his wife and his wife’s pap all live down in the Gap. Cumberland Gap is “a noted place, three kinds of water to wash your face.” Then, abruptly: “Lay down, boys, and take a little nap — fourteen miles to the Cumberland Gap.” The refrain is the place name itself, turned over and repeated.
Uncle Am Stuart — Ambrose Gaines Stuart of Morristown, Tennessee, a contest fiddler who had learned from Civil War veterans and from Black musicians around him — cut what is generally counted the first recording of it for Vocalion in June 1924, among fourteen sides made that month. He died two years later, in 1926.
