In the Pines
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Where Did You Sleep Last Night," also known as "In The Pines" and "Black Girl," is a traditional American folk song which dates back to at least the 1870s, and is believed to be Southern Appalachian in origin. The identity of the song's author is unknown, but it has been recorded by dozens of artists in numerous genres. The song was first made popular by Lead Belly in 1944, while the 1952 version by Bill Monroe set the standard for country and bluegrass renditions. A 1993 acoustic version by Kurt Cobain introduced the song to many people at the end of the twentieth century.
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Early history
Like numerous other folk songs, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" was passed on from one generation and locale to the next by word of mouth. The first printed version of the song, compiled by Cecil Sharp, appeared in 1917, and comprised just four lines and a melody. The lines are:
Black girl, black girl, don't lie to me
Where did you stay last night?
I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines
And shivered when the cold wind blows
In 1925, a version of the song was recorded onto phonograph cylinder by a folk collector. This was the first documentation of "The Longest Train" variant of the song. This variant include a stanza about "The longest train I ever saw". "The Longest Train" stanzas probably began as a separate song that later merged into "Where Did You Sleep Last Night". Lyrics in some versions about "Joe Brown's coal mine" and "the Georgia line" may date it to Joseph E. Brown, a former Governor of Georgia, who famously leased convicts to operate coal mines in the 1870s. While early renditions that mention that someone's "head was found in the driver's wheel" make clear that the train caused the decapitation, some later versions would drop the reference to the train and reattribute the cause. Music historian Norm Cohen, in his 1981 book "Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong," states the song came to consist of three frequent elements: a chorus about "in the pines", a stanza about "the longest train" and a stanza about a decapitation, though not all elements are present in all versions.
Starting the year following the 1925 recording, commercial recordings of the song were done by various "hillbilly" bands. In a 1970 dissertation, Judith McCulloh found 160 permutations of the song. As well as rearrangement of the three frequent elements, the person who goes into the pines or who is decapitated has been described as a man, a woman, an adolescent, a wife, a husband or a parent, while the pines have represented sexuality, death or loneliness. The train has been described killing a loved one, as taking one's beloved away or as leaving an itinerant worker far from home.<ref name=NYT94 />
In variants in which the song describes a confrontation, the person being challenged is always a woman, and never a man. The Kossoy Sisters folk version asks, "Little girl, little girl, where'd you stay last night? Not even your mother knows." The reply to one version's "Where did you get that dress, and those shoes that are so fine?" is "from a man in the mines, who sleeps in the pines."<ref name=NYT94 /> The theme of a woman who has been caught doing something she should not is thus also common to many variants. One variant, sang in the early twentieth century by the Ellison clan (Ora Ellison, deceased) in Lookout Mountain Georgia, told of the rape of a young Georgia girl, who fled to the pines in shame. Her rapist, a male soldier, was later beheaded by the train. Mrs. Ellison had stated that it was her belief that the song was from the time shortly after the civil war.
Appearances
In films
- The song can be heard in the background of the Nicholas Ray film The True Story of Jesse James.
- It is possible to hear the song at the end of Wild River, a 1960 film directed by Elia Kazan.
- A few lines of the song are sung by Sissy Spacek, playing Loretta Lynn, in the 1980 film, Coal Miner's Daughter.
- Lead Belly's version of the song appears in the 1997 horror film, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
In plays
- The song appears in the 1958 play A Taste of Honey, by the British dramatist Shelagh Delaney. It is sung by the character Josephine, who replaces the lyric "black girl" with "black boy." The "black boy" in the play is Jimmy, a black sailor who impregnated her after a one night stand, and with whom she is in love even though he has left her life.
