Doc Watson
Pretty Little Pink
Musicians
“Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss” is a traditional Appalachian banjo and fiddle tune with a long pre-recording-era history. Cecil Sharp collected variants of the lyric in the southern mountains during his 1916–1918 fieldwork, and the song appears with multiple alternate titles — “Blue Eyed Girl,” “Pretty Little Pink,” “Susannah Gal,” “Fare Thee Well My Pretty Little Miss” — reflecting its long oral circulation through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The earliest commercial recording is generally taken to be Samantha Bumgarner’s banjo instrumental from April 1924, one of the very earliest commercial recordings made by a woman in old-time music. The Hill Billies cut a vocal version called “Blue Eyed Girl” in October 1926, and the West Virginia Coon Hunters released “Blue Eyes Run Me Crazy” in 1927; these early sides established the song’s two main lyric streams.
Ola Belle Reed’s 1973 Folkways recording — the version associated with this entry — is a defining old-time-revival reading, with Reed’s clawhammer banjo and high mountain vocal carrying the line. The lyric is a courtship piece: floating verses about flying around the pretty little miss, returning to her, refusing to leave. It is one of the most-played pieces in bluegrass and old-time jams that lean toward the older modal repertoire and frequently doubles as a fiddle tune in a square-dance set.
