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“Prettiest Little Girl in the County” is an old-time tune with a short, repeated verse, catalogued in some collections as “Prettiest Little Girl in the Country-O.” Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, with Clayton McMichen and Riley Puckett among the band, recorded it in the late 1920s. The Library of Congress holds a recording that Alan Lomax made on 12 October 1937 of George C. Nicholson performing it, in his Kentucky recordings, and in 1979 Art Rosenbaum recorded Gordon Tanner playing it on fiddle in Georgia, with Joe Miller on guitar and John Patterson on banjo.
The verses are a few lines of courting talk. The prettiest girl in the county, dressed in calico, is the one the singer is taking to the party on a cornstalk fiddle with a pea-vine bow; he says he can’t get her in the morning, tells the boys to swing her like they love her, and reports that her mother and father think she is the prettiest too.
Norman and Nancy Blake played it as a guitar duet on Blind Dog (Rounder, 1988), recorded at Soundscape Studios in Atlanta, and We Banjo 3 included it on Gather the Good (2014).
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