Musicians
- Carter Stanley — Guitar
- Ralph Stanley — Banjo
- George Shuffler — Baritone Vocals, Bass
“Pig in a Pen” is tied above all to Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith, the Tennessee fiddler who claimed to have written it and played it often on the radio. When his Dixieliners, a group he formed with the McGee Brothers, became a regular act on the Grand Ole Opry in May 1932, “Pig in the Pen” was among the numbers they were known for, along with “Walking in My Sleep” and “Blackberry Blossom.” Smith may have built it partly from older material. The folk-song collector Mike Yates recorded Pug Allen, a fiddler in Augusta County, Virginia, singing the same verse about the pig in the pen in another tune, and suggests that some of the verses are older than Smith.
Smith recorded it for Bluebird on 17 February 1937 at the Hotel Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina, under the title “Pig at Home in a Pen.” He sang it alone while playing the fiddle, with Alton and Rabon Delmore on guitars, and Bluebird issued it on B-7043 with “Walking in My Sleep,” cut at the same session.
The song is a string of loosely linked verses. The singer has a pig at home in a pen and corn to feed him, and all he lacks is a pretty girl to feed the pig while he is gone. Other verses have him going up the mountain to sow cane for sorghum, watching a black cloud that means rain, spotting his girl by her gingham gown, and asking her to bake the biscuits brown before they leave for Alabama.
The Stanley Brothers recorded it twice. On 29 January 1963, at the King studio in Cincinnati, Carter Stanley sang lead with Ralph Stanley on tenor and banjo, Curley Lambert on mandolin, Ralph Mayo on fiddle and Vernon Derrick on bass; King released it that March as “Pig in the Pen” on the album Folk Concert. They cut it again on 18 May 1964 at Johnny’s Used Cars in Baltimore, as a trio with George Shuffler singing baritone and playing bass, for the Wango album issued in 1966 under the name John’s Country Quartet.
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