Album
Musicians
- Leroy Troy — Lead Vocals, Banjo
“Old Joe Clark” carries one of the largest bodies of floating verse in American traditional song. Collectors have gathered well over a hundred stanzas, and no two singers order them the same way. The verses most often sung open on Joe Clark himself — “a fine old man” whose recommendation is that he keeps “good likker ’round his house, good old Rock and Rye.” What follows is comic inventory rather than story: a mule whose every tooth is sixteen inches around, a yellow cat that sticks her head in the buttermilk jar and washes her sins away, a house fifteen stories high with every story full of chicken pie, a supper that ends with the singer’s nose in the butter. The farewell refrain, “Fare ye well, Old Joe Clark, fare ye well, I say,” returns between the stanzas, and singers add, drop and trade verses freely.
Folklorists have tied the name to several real men called Joe Clark in Kentucky, Virginia and Maryland. The identification repeated most often is a Kentucky mountaineer born in 1839 and murdered in 1885, though the verses themselves are older and wander in from other songs. No printed text is known from before 1900, and an early one was published in 1918 from Virginia singing.
Fiddlin’ Powers & Family, a Scott County, Virginia family band, recorded it for Victor in New York in August 1924 (Victor 19434, matrix B-30582) in one of the first commercial country sessions; it became one of the best-selling country records of that year. The Skillet Lickers followed in 1926 with a version that sold comparably, and the song passed into the bluegrass and old-time repertories with its stock of nonsense verses intact.
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