“Shady Grove” (Roud 4456) is a traditional Appalachian courting song. The folklorist and field collector Mike Yates wrote that it probably began in eastern Kentucky around the beginning of the twentieth century, and that the earliest collected set he knew of, printed in the Journal of American Folklore, is dated 1915. The Traditional Ballad Index dates the earliest collection to 1916, in Cecil Sharp’s collection, and lists the author as unknown. Jean Ritchie, who grew up in Kentucky, called it one of the mountain play-party tunes, the dance gatherings where whole families sang and danced.
The song has no plot. A young man courts a girl called Shady Grove and sings about her brown eyes and rosy cheeks, about arriving at her door as she stands there in her bare feet, and about the day he wanted a pocketknife as a boy and now wants her to be his wife, all against a chorus about being bound to go away. The Ballad Index notes that Shady Grove may be a place or a girl’s name. Singers have attached many floating verses to it, and one account puts the total at up to 300 stanzas. The tune has a second life in the ballad tradition: according to Wikipedia, the same melody was traditionally used in Appalachia for the ballad “Matty Groves,” sung by traditional singers such as Sheila Kay Adams and Dillard Chandler.
Among the early commercial recordings the Ballad Index lists are the Kentucky Thorobreds on Paramount 3080 (recorded 1927, issued 1928) and Clarence Ashley with New River Jack Burchett. Doc Watson sang it on the Walton family’s Folkways album The Doc Watson Family in 1963, and Jeff Place noted that Watson learned it from the singing of Pernell Roberts. Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys recorded it at the Bradley studio in Nashville on 10 November 1961, with Monroe singing lead, Jimmy Maynard on guitar, Curtis McPeake on banjo, Benny Williams on fiddle and Bessie Lee Mauldin on bass; it appeared on Bluegrass Ramble. In 1996 Jerry Garcia and David Grisman made it the title song of their Acoustic Disc album Shady Grove, recorded at Dawg Studios in Mill Valley, California, with Garcia singing and playing guitar, Grisman on mandolin, Jim Kerwin on bass and Joe Craven on percussion.
