“Give Me Back My Fifteen Cents” is a folk song with no known author, and it reached records through the Binkley Brothers’ Dixie Clodhoppers. The band was an old-time string band from Cheatham County, Tennessee, built around the banjo player Amos Binkley and his brother, the fiddler Gale Binkley, with Tom Andrews on guitar and Jack Jackson on guitar and vocals. They had played on Nashville’s WSM since 1926, were regulars on the Grand Ole Opry until 1938, and were among the first bands to record commercially in Nashville. Victor’s Ralph Peer found their singing too rough at a first attempt in September 1928, added Jackson to the lineup, and the band made its first recordings on 2 October 1928. “Give Me Back My Fifteen Cents” and “I’ll Rise When the Rooster Crows” were both recorded at those 1928 Victor sessions, and County reissued them on Nashville: The Early String Bands, Vol. 1 in 2000.
The song is a complaint by a husband who regrets his marriage. He left his home in Tennessee to see the world, met “a pretty little gal,” and they tied “the fatal knot.” He paid fifteen cents to the preacher and a dollar for the paper, and then his mother-in-law moved in. When he fiddled a tune, she called him a joker and his wife hit him with a poker. He is tired of working in town and on the farm for people he cannot please, and in the last verse he says he will leave the state of Arkansas and “go back home to Mammy,” asking in the chorus for his fifteen cents back.
The song stayed in the repertoire of later string-band and folk musicians. John Herald, Bill Keith, Eric Kaz, Happy Traum and Tony Brown recorded it for the 1974 Rounder collection Mud Acres: Music Among Friends. Doc and Merle Watson recorded it as “Fifteen Cents” for Down South (Sugar Hill, 1984), Doc Watson and David Grisman played it at the Acoustic Stage in Hickory, North Carolina, on 10 October 1997, a concert Acoustic Disc issued in 2018 as Doc & Dawg: Live at Acoustic Stage, and Billy Strings and Bryan Sutton included it on Live at the Legion (Reprise, 2025).
