“Sis Draper” was written by Guy Clark and Shawn Camp, and it began as a story Camp told Clark one afternoon in Nashville about a fiddler he had known as a boy in Perryville, Arkansas. Sis Draper was a real traveling fiddler whose legend Camp’s grandfather and uncle built up long before he saw her play, and the song sets her down at a country dance, fiddle in hand, with the whole room moving. Clark recorded it first on his 1999 Sugar Hill album Cold Dog Soup, and Camp put his own version on Live at the Station Inn.
The song sits on an old tune. Its verses and chorus alternate over the first and second strains of “Arkansas Traveler,” the nineteenth-century fiddle standard, so a band can drop straight from the singing into the breakdown and back. That is how Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder treat it on Brand New Strings (2004), with Andy Leftwich’s fiddle carrying the tune between Skaggs’s verses, and their recording is the one most bluegrass pickers learned it from. Clark and Camp kept writing about the character for twenty years; Camp collected those songs in 2025 as The Ghost of Sis Draper, all but one of them co-written with Clark.
