Album
Musicians
- Leroy Troy — Lead Vocals, Banjo
“Old Joe Clark” is less a story than a frame for loose comic verses. In them Joe Clark lives an improbable life of courting, gambling, drinking and mishaps. Versions run from wholesome ones, often about animals, to openly bawdy ones, and most of the verses wander in from other songs and rarely connect to one another. It was a favorite play-party game in communities whose religion forbade dancing but allowed dancing games for the young. Its tune is based on the minstrel song “Lucy Long,” and its verses are borrowed from other play-party songs such as “Ida Red,” “Shady Grove,” “Cindy” and “Liza Jane.” One Indiana farmer reckoned there were thousands of verses; scholars have put the number at 144.
A typical set mixes verses about Joe Clark with verses that have nothing to do with him. On one side are his preaching, his mule, his cat, his towering house and a supper at his table that ends badly for the guest. On the other are a reason not to marry a widow, a long road over a mountain, and a team of horses with a girl on the driver’s mind. A refrain that changes from singer to singer bids Joe Clark goodbye between the verses. Because the piece is so often played on the fiddle, and its verses connect so loosely, some have suspected that it began as an instrumental.
Its origins are uncertain. No printed example or mention of it from the 19th century is known, and it probably dates from the late 1800s or early 1900s. The earliest known reference is to its being sung in East Tennessee in 1905, and a version from Virginia singing was printed in 1918. Several real men named Joe Clark have been put forward as its subject. A Rockbridge County, Virginia, story holds that a suitor jilted by Clark’s daughter wrote it out of jealousy in the late 1800s. A Maryland account ties it to a Joe Clark who killed a traveling salesman after the Civil War. A Kentucky historical marker claims a Clay County man, born in 1839, who served briefly in the Union army, ran a government-supervised still in the 1870s and was murdered in the mid-1880s. Another account makes him a veteran of the War of 1812.
Fiddlin’ John Carson made the first record, “Fare Thee Well Old Joe Clark,” in New York in November 1923; OKeh issued it on 40038. Fiddlin’ Powers & Family, the Virginia string band led by Cowan Powers, recorded it for Victor in New York on 18 August 1924. Their Victor 19434 was the third best-selling country record of 1924, and they recorded the song again for Edison in 1925. Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers cut it for Columbia in 1926, and that record was the fourth best-selling of its year. Ernest Stoneman recorded it for Victor the same year, Bradley Kincaid for Brunswick around 1930, and W. Lee O’Daniel and the Light Crust Doughboys for Vocalion in 1935.
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