“The Cuckoo,” also called “The Coo-Coo Bird,” is a traditional song with roots in British broadsides of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It crossed the Atlantic and took on a life of its own in the southern mountains.
In its American form the song is a loose string of verses rather than a single story — the cuckoo that sings as it flies, a gambler’s lines about the jack of diamonds, scraps of love and complaint — held together by tune and mood. The well-known 1929 recording by Clarence Ashley set this jumbled, haunting pattern.
Ashley’s recording, later included on the Anthology of American Folk Music, carried the song to generations of revival and bluegrass musicians. The version heard here is by Doc and Merle Watson.