Musicians
“Wildwood Flower” grew out of “I’ll Twine ’Mid the Ringlets,” a song published in 1860 by H. M. Higgins of Chicago. The music is by Joseph Philbrick Webster, the Wisconsin composer who later wrote the hymn “In the Sweet By and By.” The words are credited to Maud Irving. Poems printed under that name in the 1860s periodical Home Monthly carry bylines indicating it was a pen name of the poet and spiritualist J. William Van Namee. The song passed into oral tradition, and collectors in the early twentieth century found it under titles such as “The Pale Amaranthus” and “The Pale Wildwood Flower.”
The Carter Family recorded it for Victor on 10 May 1928, Maybelle Carter’s nineteenth birthday, at the company’s studio in the Trinity Baptist Church in Camden, New Jersey. Victor issued it in January 1929 on V-40000, backed with “Forsaken Love” from the same day. By the time the Carters sang it, the 1860 text had worn into new shapes. The ringlets in which the singer twines her flowers have worn into a word with no clear meaning, and the aronatus, a flower nobody has identified, has dropped out of the verse. The story is unchanged. A girl says she will dance and sing, wear flowers in her hair and charm every heart, but the man who taught her to love him and promised to cherish her has gone without a word of farewell and left her, the wildwood flower of the title, behind. On the record, Maybelle’s guitar carries the melody and the rhythm together, the style that came to be called the “Carter scratch.” The family recorded the song again for ARC in New York on 8 May 1935.
The 1928 recording was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2006. Woody Guthrie set the verses of “The Sinking of the Reuben James” to the tune. Maybelle Carter led a performance of it on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 album Will the Circle Be Unbroken, and she often played it in concert with Johnny Cash and on his television show. Her daughter June Carter Cash closed her last album, Wildwood Flower, with the song. The album was recorded between October 2002 and March 2003, produced by her son John Carter Cash, and released on Dualtone in September 2003, four months after her death.
Assisted by AI.
Spot something off? Help us fix it.
