Artist: Dock Walsh
Author: traditional
Label: Columbia
Year: 1926
Pre Carolina Tar Heels. Re-issued in '68 on lp Ballads And Breakdowns Of The Golden Era.
Covers:
Tenneva Ramblers [as The Longest Train I Ever Saw; during the Bristol Sessions]
Darby Tarlton [as Lonesome In The Pines]
Convicts of Bellwood Prison Camp, Atlanta, GA [idem; Lomax recording]
J.E. Mainer's Mountaineers [idem]
Riley Puckett [idem]
Fiddlin' Arthur Smith [idem]
Lead Belly [as Black Girl (Where Did You Sleep Last Night); maybe overheard the Lomax recording as their chauffeur in '34]
Bascom Lamar Lunsford [as To The Pines, To The Pines]
Lonnie Donegan [as Black Girl]
Bob Dylan [as Where Did You Sleep Last Night]
Journeymen [as Black Girl]
Sir Douglas Quintet [as It Was In The Pines]
Four Pennies [as Black Girl]
Marianne Faithfull [idem]
Clifford Jordan [vocal: Sandra Douglass]
Shawn Phillips [idem]
Grateful Dead [as Where Did You Sleep Last Night]
Long John Baldry [idem]
Link Wray [as Georgia Pines]
Mark Lanegan [singer of The Screaming Trees]
Nirvana [as Where Did You Sleep Last Night]
Billy Childish & The Blackhands [as Black Girl]
Snakefarm [idem]
Hans Theessink [as My Girl]
Country Ladies [idem, crediting Lead Belly]
Wandering [with Luther Dickinson]
Roland Van Campenhout [as Black Girl]
Tijs Delbeke [with Lady Lynn, Gregory Frateur and Stijn Meuris]
Pretty Things [as Black Girl]
Collected in 1917 by British musicologist Cecil Sharp from Miss Lizzie Abner in the Oneida School, Clay Co., KY. Judith McCulloh compared some 160 versions of this song cluster in her unpublished Ph.D paper: In The Pines - The Melodic-Textual Identity Of An American Lyric Folk-Song Cluster, University of Indiana, 1970. Her conclusion: the song came from Georgia in the 1870's. The mingling of similar songs like The Longest Train, In The Pines, Reuben's Train, Train 45, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, Black Girl and 900 Miles are also discussed in Norm Cohen's book about trains: Long Steel Rail.
If you noticed blunt omissions, mis-interpretations or even out-and-out errors,
please let me know:
Arnold Rypens
Rozenlaan 65
B-2840 Reet (Rumst)