"Jenny's Gone to Ohio" ** UPDATED 03-12 **

A.k.a. "Jenny's Gone Away." Dulcimer tab in DAD by Doofus ... Don Pedi has lyrics w/ fret numbers above the words for Ionian tunings on his website

Peggy Seeger sings it on her album Heading for Home (click here for an audio clipA). Joe Hickerson, in the liner notes, says the song is traditional. He adds:

In June 1959 folksong collector Philip Kennedy attended a Tart family reunion in Benson, North Carolina, where he heard Carlie Tart and his sister leading a 3-verse song about Ginnie. He described the incident in his article "An Unusual Work-Song Found in North Carolina: "Ginnie's Gone to Ohio'," in North Carolina Folklore, volume 15, number 1, May 1967, pp. 30-34. The song was part of a family "group-singing" tradition going back at least a century and had originally been learned from black singers. The three verses began with "Ginnie's gone to Ohio, Ginnie's gone away," "Ginnie's a pretty girl, don't you know," and "Ginnie's dressed in her strings and rags." The chorus was "(Oh) Ginnie's gone away, Ginnie's gone to Ohio, Ginnie's gone away." In the article, Phil mentions two parallels to the song: "Jenny shake her toe at me, Jenny gone away," which was reported as early as 1839 from black singers on St. Simon's Island, Georgia; and the sea chantey, "Tom's Gone to Hilo."

I learned the song from Phil Kennedy in 1960. I soon added three verses and have performed it many times since, occasionally as "Jenny's Gone To Ohio." My melody with Kennedy's words and notes appeared in Sing Out!, vol. 17, no. 2, April-May 1967, pp. 16-17. ...

Peggy recalls learning the song in England from an American singer. So, from wherever Ginnie or Ginny or Jenny started her journey to Ohio, her peregrinations (with added details from myself and others) eventually took her from the USA to England and back to the USA and, of course, to all those places good songs go.

Two articles available through JSTOR on "Jenny Shake Her Toe at Me" - African American slave song ... one quotes Fanny Kemble who heard it in 1830s, called it "a very distinct descendant of "Coming Through the Rye" ...

Jenny's Toe: Negro Shaking Dances in America
Chadwick Hansen
American Quarterly
Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 554-563

The other uotes William Cullen Bryant in 1843 [but T'm not sure what he says about it, except he heard it at a corn shucking in S.C.

Jenny's Toe Revisited: White Responses to Afro-American Shaking Dances
Chadwick Hansen
American Music
Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 1-19