A June apple is an early-ripening variety that comes in around the start of summer in the southern states, and the tune named for it belongs to the stretch of country between Hillsville and Galax in Virginia and Mount Airy in North Carolina. It is most often played as an instrumental; where singers do use words, the words sit on the second strain. In modern playing the tune is bound up with the fiddler Tommy Jarrell, who said he had it from his father and who recorded it in the late 1960s with Oscar Jenkins and Fred Cockerham.
The verses are a string of unrelated wishes and scenes rather than a story. The first is the one everyone knows: wish I was a June apple hanging on a tree, so that every time my true love passed she would take a little bite of me. After that the singer crosses the mountain expecting to hear his woman singing on the other side; the banjo itself is quoted, saying “I wish that gal was mine”; Charlie turns up, a nice young man and a dandy who feeds the girls on candy; there is a trip over the river to feed the sheep on barley; and it closes on a wish for sticks and poles to build the chimney higher, since as things stand every rain and snow puts the fire out.
Michael Daves cut it in 2016 to open Orchids and Violence on Nonesuch, a two-disc set on which he recorded the same traditional repertoire twice — once as bluegrass, once electric. This is the bluegrass reading, and the first track of the set.
