On Top of Old Smokey

Song facts

From Wikipedia:

“On Top of Old Smoky” (often spelled “Smokey”) is a traditional folk song of the United States. As recorded by The Weavers, the song reached the pop music charts in 1951. It is catalogued as Roud Folk Song Index No. 414.

History as folk song

It is unclear when, where and by whom the song was first sung. In historical times folksongs were the informal property of the communities that sang them, passed down through generations. They were published only when a curious person took the trouble to visit singers and document their songs, an activity that in America began only around the turn of the 20th century. For this reason it is unlikely that an originator of “On Top of Old Smoky” could ever be identified. […]

Emergence of the song in popular music

Cecil Sharp collected Appalachian folksongs just before the time when that music came to be “discovered” by the outside world and sold as a commercial product by the nascent recording industry, a development which would ultimately create the modern genre of country music. The first to make a commercial recording of “On Top of Old Smoky” was George Reneau, “The Blind Musician of the Smoky Mountains”, who worked as a busker in Knoxville, Tennessee, just west of the Appalachians. In 1925, Reneau made the trip to New York City to record the song, and others, for Vocalion (Vo 15366). His version of “On Top of Old Smoky” used the alternative tune noted above.

In the 1940s through the mid 1960s, the United States experienced a folk music revival, of which Pete Seeger was a leading figure. His music, some of it drawn from scholarly sources like Sharp, was popular, and was disseminated widely in commercial recordings. Seeger modified a version of “On Top of Old Smoky” that he had learned in the Appalachians, writing new words and banjo music. He said that he thought that “certain verses go back to Elizabethan times.” The sheet music for the song credited Seeger for “new words and music arrangement”.

The Weavers, a folk-singing group that Seeger had co-founded, recorded a very popular version of the song, using Seeger’s arrangement, on 21 February 1951. It was released by Decca Records as catalog number 27515, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard chart and No. 1 on the Cash Box chart, and selling over a million copies.

The enormous popularity of those recordings (and others following in their wake – see below) led to the curious situation of the song re-attaining folk status. It is one of the few songs that most Americans know from childhood, and many are unaware of the mid-century recordings that promulgated it so widely. […]