“Pallet on the Floor,” also known as “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” and “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,” is an older blues and folk song. It probably dates from the end of the nineteenth century; a jazz historian has said it could have been sung around New Orleans in the mid-1890s. A 1906 Indianapolis newspaper reported a performance of it, a version appeared in sheet music in 1908 in Blind Boone’s Southern Rag Medley No. One, and the folklorist Howard Odum printed lyrics that he had heard in Mississippi in a 1911 article. W. C. Handy used it as the chorus of “Atlanta Blues,” published in 1923. A pallet, as Jelly Roll Morton explained, is a bed made on the floor out of quilts.
Early recordings include Virginia Liston (OKeh, 1925), Ethel Waters (Columbia, 1926), Mississippi John Hurt (OKeh, 1928) and the Stripling Brothers, who recorded it as “Pallet on the Floor” for Decca in 1936. The Country Gentlemen recorded it at Wynwood Recording Studios in Falls Church, Virginia, on 14 April 1963, and it appears on Hootenanny: A Blue Grass Special (Design DLP 613, 1963). John Duffey sang lead, with Charlie Waller and Eddie Adcock on the other vocal parts; Waller played guitar, Adcock banjo, Duffey mandolin and Tom Gray bass. Doc Watson recorded it as “Make Me a Pallet” on Memories (United Artists, 1975), and Gillian Welch included it on Soul Journey (2003), crediting herself with additional lyrics.
In the version the Country Gentlemen sang, the narrator asks for a pallet on someone’s floor, soft and low so that his girl will not know. He is broke and would be satisfied just to catch a train and ride, even if he reached Atlanta with no place to go. He says the blues are everywhere he looks, and he asks his good-time friends, who treated him fine when he had a dollar, where they went when he had only a dime.
