The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane
The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane est une chanson populaire écrite par William Shakespeare Hays (en)en 1871. Écrite en dialecte, la chanson raconte l'histoire d'un vieil homme, un esclave vraisemblablement, passant ses dernières années dans une vieille carlingue.
La chanson très populaire, a été utilisée comme base pour plusieurs autres chansons. La mélodie a été employée couramment dans quelques chansons western comme The Little Old Sod Shanty On The Claim et Little Joe the Wrangler (en)[1], Little Red Caboose Behind The Train ou encore The Lily of the Valley.
Fiddlin' John Carson enregistra une version de The Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane. Ce fut le premier enregistrement commercial fait par une personne rurale blanche[2]. Le succès de ce titre motiva l'industrie du disque à enregistrer d'autres chansons folk.
Ce titre est devenu depuis un standard de la musique bluegrass.
Notes et références
- Thorp, Songs of the Cowboys, pp. xviii-xviv: « Again, others have been built upon well-known airs; 'The Cowboy's Dream' is sung to the tune of 'My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,' and Jack Thorp's 'Little Joe, the Wrangler' was composed to the tune of 'The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane'. »
- Carlin, Country Music, p. x: « One artist whom Brockman recommended was a fifty-plus-year-old fiddler and sometime house painter named Fiddlin' John Carson; the Okeh label dutifully made a custom record of Carson singing the late-nineteenth-century popular song 'The little Old Log Cabin in the Lane' for Brockman to sell, but didn't even bother to assign a master number or affix a label to the 500 records pressed for him. It was only after the record became a regional hit that the light bulb of commerce lit up in the executives' heads, and suddenly they were scouring the countryside for entertainers. »
Bibliographie
- Carlin, Richard. Country Music: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Routledge (2002).
- Thorp, N. Howard "Jack". Songs of the Cowboys. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908, 1921.
- Waltz, Robert B; David G. Engle. "Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane". The Traditional Ballad Index: An Annotated Bibliography of the Folk Songs of the English-Speaking World. Hosted by California State University, Fresno, Folklore, 2007.