One of the songs New Salem’s dulcimer players enjoy performing is “Going Down to Cairo,” a fiddle tune and play party song that has distinct echoes of frontier Illinois. It’s one of at least four we’re brushing up on during this year’s off-season.
Several of us met in October and November, and we enjoyed sharing both the tunes we play and the experiences we’ve had interacting with visitors. We were snowed out before the holidays, but we met again after New Year’s and decided to keep meeting at least through the off-season. Watch The Picayune for further details.
Everyone is invited to join us the first Saturday in the month. Some of us have been playing a while, but we’re very open to beginners. Specific tunes we’re working on are:
"Going Down to Cairo.” A song about the wide-open river town in southern Illinois. Which I’ll get to below:
"Hebrew Children.” A camp meeting song that’s associated with the Rev. Peter Cartwright. Miriam Green has worked out the harmony parts, and I’ve located a shape-note version that tells how Peter Cartwright used the song.
“The Sow Took the Measles.” A 19th-century song collected by Alan Lomax. I first saw it in a cloth-bound songbook prepared for New Salem interpreters 10 or 15 years ago, and it tells how folks used to make do, use it up and wear it out.
“Turkey in the Straw.” The old, old fiddle tune we all learned as children and still hear from ice cream trucks in the summertime. In New Salem days, it was known as “Natchez Under the Hill.” In the old river towns, “under the hill” was the part of town down in the river bottom where saloons and other disorderly houses were apt to be located. So it started as a song about another river town.
In addition to the title, “Going Down to Cairo” has strong associations with frontier days in Illinois. Some of us learned it as “Black Them Boots.”
Whatever you call it, the song is one of the many variants of “Little Liza Jane,” a popular American dance tune in both the black and white musical traditions found wherever fiddles were played or children gathered for singing games. It’s one of “a handful of folk songs native to the state of Illinois,” according to Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, but its tune is basically the same as the bluegrass standard “Eight More Miles to Louisville.”
The story behind “Going Down to Cairo is certainly specific to Illinois. In his book “Folk Songs and Singing Games of the Illinois Ozarks,” David McIntosh said it comes from a “play party” circle dance for eight couples. In spite of its strong association with children’s singing games, it traces back to Cairo’s past as a wide-open river town when farmers shipped corn to market there by flatboat.
“It was pretty hard to find a good place to pass the time away so they began going to the saloons and various other places where they were entertained,” said McIntosh’s source for the song. “The women noticed on the return trips that the men ‘blacked their boots’ and dressed up a great deal more than usual and began to make frequent trips to Cairo.”
The words are:
Black them boots and make them shine,And another verse begins:
Goodbye and a goodbye.
Black them boots and make them shine,
Goodbye, Liza Jane.
Going down to Cairo, with a goodbye and a goodbye.
Going down to Cairo, goodbye Liza Jane.
I ain’t got time to kiss you now,As McCulloch heard the story, wives and girlfriends upriver didn’t allow that situation to exist very long.
Goodbye and a goodbye.
I ain't got time to kiss you now,
Goodbye, Liza Jane ...
“As a result of this,” he said, “many of the women began going with their husbands, and the manner of entertainment was somewhat changed.”
I’ll bet it was.
Maybe there’s an echo here of how a rowdy old fiddle tune like “Going Down to Cairo” turned up in southern Illinois as a children’s game.
McCulloch said the story traced back to a bad crop year in the 1850s. But Illinoisans had been going down to Cairo to buy and sell corn long before that – at least since the “deep snow” winter of 1831 when southern Illinois got to be known as Egypt by bible-quoting farmers who remembered the Book of Genesis and joked, “behold, there is corn in Egypt.”
Fiddlers traditionally play “Going Down to Cairo” in G, but dulcimer players commonly tab it out nowadays in DAD. When I’m not playing in a group, I like to tune my dulcimer to DGD and try to “swing” it, or syncopate the melody a little. If you want to hear a really nice version on line, Wilmette Central Elementary School’s Virtual Museum Project has an mp3 file of third-graders singing it with a rollicking piano for backup.
The Fiddler’s Companion, compiled by Andrew Kuntz, is an indispensable resource for tracing the history and provenance of fiddle tunes like “Going Down to Ciro,” “Turkey in the Straw” or practically anything else you ever heard of. For alphabetical links to tunes from a Scots dance piece called “A.A. Cameron’s Strathspey,” to a Welsh air called Ystwffwl (the Doorknocker), go to his index page at http://www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/FCfiles.html
The Old Town School of Folk Music’s website indexes notes on dozens of songs from “Amazing Grace” to “Worried Man Blues. Their notes on “Going Down to Cairo" are at http://www.oldtownschool.org/resources/songnotes/songnotes_G.html
Wilmette Central Elementary School’s Virtual Museum Project> is at http://www.wilmette39.org/virtualmuseum/. To hear the third-graders singing “Going Down to Cairo," click on the link to “Illinois History through Song” in 2005. One of my goals for 2007 is to learn to play it with their verve at their tempo.
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