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Been to the East, Been to the West (Jaybird's Altar, The)
Old-Time, Breakdown. Traditional music and words.
ARTIST: From Steve Meekins 1941, collected by Frank and Anne Warner
Listen: Steve Meekins 1941
CATEGORY: Fiddle and Instrumental Tunes;
DATE: 1941; dates back to 1846 as minstrel lyrics
RECORDING INFO: Columbia 15318 (78 RPM), Leake County Revelers (1928). Varrick VR -038, Yankee Ingenuity - "Heatin' Up the Hall" (1989). Leake County Revelers. Traditional Fiddle Music of Mississippi, Vol. 2, County 529, LP (1975), cut# 12 .Winston, Dave. Southern Clawhammer, Kicking Mule KM 213, Cas (1978), cut#B.05. Yankee Ingenuity. Heatin' up the Hall, Varrick 038, LP (1989), cut# 4a . Bubba Hutch- Clawhammer Banjo.
OTHER NAMES: "Great Big Yam Potatoes" A similar tune is "Going to Chattanooga," in the 'A' part.
SOURCES: Randolph 574, "The Jaybird's Altar"; Liz Slade (Yorktown, New York) [Kuntz]; Mary Lea [Phillips]. Kuntz, Private Collection. Phillips (Traditional American Fiddle Tunes), Vol. 1, 1994; pg. 29. Songer (Portland Collection), 1997; pg. 26. Leake County Revelers Volume 1, 1927-1928 Document DOCD-8029; Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc.
NOTES: In 1941 Frank and Anne Warner collected this version of "Been To The East" from Steve Meekins. (See more info below)
G major. Standard. AB (Phillips): AABB (Kuntz, Songer). Traditional Fiddle and clawhammer banjo tune. The song became a popular play-party song in the late 1800s and early 1900. The first published lyrics are from the 1846 minstrel song "Brack Eyed Susianna."
In 1846 (and 1848) a minstrel tune was published as "Brack Eyed Susianna," by A. Fiot, Philadelphia. Copies are in American Memory and the Levy collection. The blackface dialect is thick, but a little-less stylized version was published in a broadside by Pratt, Birmingham, England, about 1850; Bodleian Library, Ballads Catalogue, Harding B 11(360).
View page 1 Black-Eyed Susiannah!- View page 2 Black-Eyed Susiannah!-
Black-Eyed Susiannah!
I've been to the east, I've been to the west,
I've been to Indiana,
There is no one there, or anywhere,
Like my charming Susiannah.
As a play-party song it was first published by Ames in the 1911 JOAFL under the title "I've been to the East" (with music- see below). Ames said, "As this was sung, the real name of the father of some girl on the floor was substituted for "John Jones," and the young man without a partner chose her for his partner. Many of the plays included a method of changing partners."
I'VE BEEN TO THE EAST- 1911 with music; Ames- JOAFL
I've been to the East I've been to the West,
I've been to the jay-bird's altar,
And the prettiest girl I ever did see
Was old John Jones's daughter.
Randolph published a version in 1940 titled "Jaybird's Alter" with substantially the same lyrics as Ames (See Version 3). The only early recording I have is from fiddler Steve Meekin in 1941 (See Version 4).
Below is a report on the Warner's collection expidition in 1941:
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From Songs on the Salt Air by Kent Priestley:
Seaside sounds
The Warners had reason to believe that the Outer Banks would prove a musical gold mine. After all, Brown had found songs and stories here in the 1920s. One of Brown’s informants at the time was a fishing captain and able musician from Wanchese named C.K. “Tink” Tillett. His nephew, P.D. Midgette, was one of Frank’s classmates at Duke and urged him to look up his uncle. So the couple’s brief reconnaissance to Wanchese in 1938 and again in 1940 was as much to make good on a promise as it was to beat the musical bushes.
Their 1941 visit was especially fertile. From singers in Wanchese, Manteo, Manns Harbor, Kitty Hawk, Elizabeth City, Engelhard, Nags Head, and Colington, they recorded more than 100 tracks. The titles alone tell a story. Some have a moral tone, such as “Seven Long Years in a State Prison,” “Goodbye Old Booze,” and “The Gangster’s Warning.” Others are straight-out gospel numbers such as “Lonesome Valley” and “Hold My Hand, Lord Jesus.” Still others are holdovers from the days of minstrelsy, like “Old Dan Tucker.” The Outer Banks singers shared sentimental numbers like “Be Home Soon Tonight” and “Is There No Kiss for Me?” and, most gratifyingly for the song-collectors, a large number of little-changed ballads from the British Isles. Among them were “The Dark-Eyed Sailor,” “Lord Thomas,” “The Sheffield Apprentice,” and “The Jolly Thresher.”
“The folksinger Bob Copper in Sussex, England, knew ‘The Jolly Thresher,’ but he sang ‘thresher’ as ‘thrasher,’ ” says Jeff. “Well, here was Eleazar Tillett on the North Carolina coast singing the same song and pronouncing the word the same way as him. And so you get this strong connection, a connection going back to what? The romantic version, I suppose, is of English sailors coming ashore on the Outer Banks in shipwrecks. But it may have been something as simple as commerce between the two places.”
Eleazar Tillett and her sister, Martha Etheridge, fit neatly into that former theory. The sisters, whose father had once been keeper of the Bodie Island Lighthouse, were born with the surname Gallop, heirs to a family line that they claimed stretched back to an Irish sailor who washed ashore on these sand islands.
The unique Outer Banks accent — which many attribute to the islands’ British settlers —- is evident on many of the tracks the Warners recorded. Anne also made note of it in her book, sharing a story of the time one of the Tilletts’ sons, Cliff, visited New York while in the Coast Guard.
“Ever’body,” Warner quoted Tillett as saying, “thought Oi was Oirish, said they could see it right into me.”
Music wherever they went
It takes some imagination to see the Outer Banks as it looked when the Warners first visited here. Cross your eyes a bit, crop out the mini-golf dinosaurs, the all-you-can-eat shrimp buffets, and towering rental “cottages”; leave only the pines and wax myrtle and sand and a scattering of shingled houses, and you’re closer to knowing the place as they did.
The photographs they took during their summer visits almost seem to show a different world. In one of them, Jockey’s Ridge looms above a solitary cottage, the home of Captain John and Alwilda Culpeper. The starkness of the scene reminds one of Edward Hopper’s forlorn landscapes. Another, taken in Manns Harbor, shows the homeplace of C.W. Mann and family, alone in a sandy field ringed by sheltering live oaks.
By hunches and word of mouth, the Warners found music wherever they went. Inquiring at Kitty Hawk, 12 miles north of Nags Head, they learned of an old fiddler named Steve Meekins, who, claiming old age and forgetfulness, still managed to saw out nine tunes for them on a fiddle he said was 185 years old. His rendering of the melody “Been to the East” seems to bear more relation to Irish than Southern fiddling.
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According to a review in the Old-Time Herald: His rendering of "Been to the East" is gloomy and austere and sounds like no other recorded version of the tune, as if Meekins had been there himself and had a low opinion of the place.
BEEN TO THE EAST- Steve Meekins 1941
Listen: Steve Meekins 1941
I've been to the east, I've been to the west,
I've been to South Carolina.
When I spied a pretty *little gal,
And I'm going back to marry her.
How're you gettin' along with a hog-eye?
*yellow
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