“Sourwood Mountain” is both a song and a fiddle tune, and its origins are obscure. The Fiddler’s Companion calls it a tune widely collected across the South, especially in banjo settings, and a long-used play-party melody, and says its melodic material was undoubtedly imported from the British Isles. The title is a place-name that also exists in Massachusetts, and a ballad about a young man fatally bitten by a snake became attached to it as well. The tune turns up in the records of southern fiddling early: a West Virginia fiddler, Sol Nelson, was said to play it around 1880, it was mentioned in lists of tunes played at Berea, Kentucky, in 1915, and it was played at the Berea fiddle contests of 1919 and 1920.
It was recorded several times in 1924. Uncle “Am” Stuart, a fiddler from Morristown, Tennessee, recorded it in New York around 7 July 1924 with Gene Austin on banjo, issued on Vocalion 14840, and Henry Whitter’s Virginia Breakdowners recorded it for OKeh around 16 July 1924, on a 12-inch record paired with “Mississippi Sawyers.” Fiddlin’ Cowan Powers recorded it for Victor in 1924 and Edison in 1925, and Taylor’s Kentucky Boys with Doc Roberts recorded it for Gennett in 1927. Hylo Brown and his Timberliners included it on the Starday LP Bluegrass Goes to College in 1962, and the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys recorded it for a King LP in 1964.
The words sung with the tune are a string of courting verses with a nonsense refrain after each line. Chickens crow on Sourwood Mountain, and there are more pretty girls there than can be counted. Later verses pick out a sweetheart across the water, a blue-eyed daisy, and a girl who lives in the hollow and can come along when she likes, with the singer ready to follow.
