“Pallet on the Floor” is a variant title for the traditional African-American song best known as “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,” with deep roots in the late-19th-century Mississippi Delta blues and Appalachian string-band traditions. The song first appears in W.C. Handy’s 1926 collection Blues: An Anthology, where Handy described hearing it as a teenager in St. Louis around 1892, performed by a Black guitarist as a lullaby variant.
The Country Gentlemen’s 1963 reading on the Design Records album Hootenanny brought the song to the early-1960s folk-revival audience. The Country Gentlemen lineup of the period — Charlie Waller on guitar and lead vocal, John Duffey on mandolin and tenor, Eddie Adcock on banjo, Tom Gray on bass — was redrawing the bluegrass repertoire to include outside material like this and Bob Dylan covers.
The lyric is a plain plea to a lover who has another partner: just make me a pallet on the floor, the singer asks, where I can sleep through the night and slip away in the morning before anyone wakes.
